Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

A 21st Century Theological Dispute

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 […]

Trump and the market

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 […]

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon  on the still-unreported-in-MSM […]

Housing and Young People

We’ve lost the plot on the classic life arc of yesteryear. Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. The most recent evidence of this remarkable change comes in a new report by the real-estate firm […]

Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet

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 […]

Scenes from the May employment report: expect more lackluster reports, and layoffs in manufacturing

Scenes from the May employment report: expect more lackluster reports, and layoffs in manufacturing Three months ago when the poor February jobs report came out, I was just about the only commentator who saw it as a harbinger rather than an outlier. On Friday the naysayers got silenced.Let’s see how the more leading aspects of the employment […]

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer For all the slicing and dicing that has been done in voting metrics for 2016 and 2018, one quandary has stood out. We know that higher educational attainment has strongly correlated with voting for Democrats, and we also […]