Construction Spending Falls 0.3% in May after March & April Spending Revised Higher, Commenter RJS, Marketwatch 666 The Census Bureau report on construction spending for May (pdf) estimated that May’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,545.3 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.3 percent (±1.0 percent)* below the revised annualized estimate […]
June data starts out mixed: manufacturing strong, housing stalls, New Deal democrat June data started out this morning with the ISM manufacturing report. There was no big change from last month’s torrid pace. The overall index declined a very slight -0.6% to 60.6, while the leading new orders component declined by 1 to 66:Any number […]
June jobs report: a tale of two very different surveys – but both far from full recovery HEADLINES: 850,000 jobs added. Of these, 662,000 were private sector jobs, and 188,000 were government jobs, chiefly in education. The alternate, and more volatile measure in the household report indicated a gain of only 128,000 jobs, which factors […]
Farmer-economist Michael Smith comments from More Random News Events of the Week post ________ My comment on the open thread, “what exactly does the federal government plan to do this is a little mind boggling. The USDA is limited in the resources they have. They can provide grants but it would need congress to fund […]
Gotta give credit where credit is due. If not for my morning readings at other sites, I would not have run across this gem at Crooks and Liars as done by Chris capper Liebenthal. This gentleman, ahh redneck, paints the situation a bit differently than what I or other more learned (than I) people might […]
New jobless claims: a surprise to the positive side I have been paying particular attention to new jobless claims this year, as being the most important weekly economic datapoint to correlate with vaccination progress. My ultimate target for claims is an average of 325,000 or below, which would signify a return to normal expansion levels in […]
Karl Marx did not use the phrase, socially necessary labour time (or its equivalent, labour time [that is] socially necessary) in the Grundrisse (1857-58 notebooks). He did, however, refer once to “the necessary labour of society”: As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its […]
PhD geneticist and molecular biologist Joel Eissenberg discussing CRISPR results. — “A watershed moment in modern medicine,” says genetics expert The promise of gene therapy may finally be realized. I’ve been a PhD geneticist and molecular biologist for nearly 40 years. During that time, I’ve seen the cloning of many human genes for which inherited […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 30: 2 to 4 weeks until a likely major “Delta” outbreak in unvaccinated regions Missouri has been the US bellwether for the onset of the “Delta” variant of COVID. This makes the below graph by Charles Gaba of infection rates by county for June in Missouri particularly insightful: As has been […]