Empire State Manufacturing: OUCH! I’m on vacation this week, so fair warning that there is probably going to be light posting! The only economic news of note today was the Empire State Manufacturing Index. Only one district, only one survey, in a noisy series, but just the same, the overall index fell to -8.6 and […]
I’ve been on the beat of income inequality since I started blogging here. My theory: We changed the way we make money from one of making it from producing (polishing rocks into tools) to one of making money from money. When you can make money from moving money, you don’t need to compete. Just buy […]
Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 10 – 14 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The divergence between the near term vs. longer term forecast is increasing, and the risk that the forecast is too optimistic is asymmetrical, because for the economy, Trump’s chaotic tariff behavior cannot improve […]
Learning The Origin Of “Duality” Yesterday I learned that the person who first used the term “duality” in connection with linear programming, indeed with anything in economics, was John von Neumann in a private conversation with George Dantzig in 1947, the “father of linear programming.” That was the year Dantzig published his paper showing the […]
Robert J. Samuelson Goes Whole Hog Against Dems On Social Programs I want to follow Dean Baker in dumping on the Robert J. Samuelson Monday, 9/11/19 WaPo column on “The Democrats’ fairy-tale campaigns.” He may be right that lots of proposals have been put forward with no clear accounting of how much all of them […]
Kevin Drum wrote a typically brilliant post on absurdly high estimates of the growth of the number of health care administrators. I was very interested in one little passage. My comment. Dear Kevin You used to work for a tech company and IIRC in public relations. Now your day job is as a blogger-journalist. Don’t […]
People have long struggled to understand The Word of God. One might even wonder if a better approach would be to rely on artificial intelligence. However, I’m not sure AI algorithms understand Him either This shows that even God the Omnipotent can’t manage sarcasm blatant enough for Twitter. Twitter has repented, but it looks like […]
When the market is up, Trump likes to credit it to his economic policies and when the market is down he likes to find someone else to blame, like the Fed. After being in office for some two years it is time enough to either give him credit or grief and to compare him to […]