Ali Velshi Interviews Arthur Laffer Today I endured listening to Arthur Laffer lie serially to Ali Velshi today. Skip the first 36 minutes of this Youtube as the interview begins there. Never mind the praise for Laffer’s cheerleading for Trump. Laffer actually claimed that the FED’s low interest rates after the Great Recession began was the cause […]
It is doubtful Trump reads much beyond his own signature on Executive Orders and Twitter commentary. Someone is attempting to align him with current thinking creating a persona of his being a thoughtful and reasoning president as opposed to . . . ? In “Again, Healthcare Cost Drivers Pharma, Doctors, and Hospitals ,” I had […]
Via Naked Capitalism: Place based economic conditions and the geography of the opioid overdose crisis By Shannon Monnat, Associate Professor, Syracuse University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Over 400,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since 2000. However, there is widespread geographic variation in fatal opioid overdose rates, […]
(Dan here….) Via the New York Times comes an article on the Social Security shortfall. No explanations given for what the shortfall context is, and not till the end was a fix suggested. In comments calling SS a ponzi scheme (with no explanation) was common, or with the fix mostly was about lifting the cap. […]
Regional Fed indexes confirm that manufacturing is flat [A reminder: this week I’m on vacation, so light posting is the rule.] Earlier this week the Empire State Manufacturing Index went negative. This morning the Philly Index just barely avoided the same, reported at up +0.3 for June: The more leading new orders index declined to […]
Trucking suggests transport slowing, but has not rolled over I have been paying particular attention to the monthly report of the American Trucking Association, to compare its performance with rail, which has been sagging since the beginning of this year. A few other people are relying on the Cass Freight Index, but since that includes […]
Will Libra Destroy Cryptocurrenciees Or Vice Versa? Yesterday, Facebook released a White Paper on their planned supposed cryptocurrency, Libra, which has apparently long been under development. This triggered two stories in the New York Times, as well as lots of commentary by lots of people, including several posts by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who […]
Interesting there is not a peep on this in the US and literally hundreds of thousands of women gathered in the streets of the Swiss cities. 40,000 in front of parliament in Bern and the same was repeated in the cities of Lausanne, Geneva, and other places. It is said the turnout is greater in […]
May real retail sales positive, but industrial production remains in a shallow recession Retail sales are one of my favorite indicators, because in real terms they can tell us so much about the present, near term forecast, and longer term forecast for the economy. This morning retail sales for May were reported up +0.5%, and […]