Leading scenes from the employment report not so positive I seem to have been the only person to pick up on the weakness in the underlying leading aspects of last Friday’s jobs report. While the number of job gains was great, and that average wages for non-managerial workers had their second best showing, at 3.4%, […]
If you want to understand why Mark Thoma’s 12-year daily-and-then-some blogging effort has become intermittent, consider that President Shit-for-Brains has made his nomination for the person to ru(i)n the World Bank. David Malpass. This David Malpass. The best part of the nomination so far? This Twitter feed from Charles Kenny. Brad DeLong concurs. And I’m […]
The End Of The End Of The Cold War It is a sign of how wacko things have gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply been buried in the news by all the huffing and puffing over Trump’s shutdown ending and these revelations about VA Governor Northam. This would […]
Reduction in Representation as the remedy for voter suppression This is the second take prompted by my reading of David W. Blight‘s biography of Frederick Douglass. In the “nothing is every really new” department, voter suppression was very much on the mind of Douglass and other radical Republicans during the Civil War and its immediate […]
Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Copperhead GOP I am currently reading David W. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and champion of black equality. Today I wanted to briefly write on several timely topics inspired by that tome. Douglass was biracial, or in the parlance of the day, a mulatto. His […]
January jobs report: a tale of two almost diametrically opposed components HEADLINES: +304,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.9% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.5% from 7.6% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 28 – February 1 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.There are continuing if small shifts in all of the long leading, short leading, and coincident timeframes.
I Support Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam Current media is denouncing VA Gov Ralph Northam with many demanding he resign now over an unfortunate incident in his youth. I note that that the final crucial person who gave us Obamacare was the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. He was in his youth a member […]
Advance reading of January manufacturing supports further slowdown I have been using an average of the five regional Fed new orders indexes to forecast the direction of the ISM manufacturing new orders index, and indirectly manufacturing production. Now that all five regional Fed indexes have been reported, here’s a comparison of the regional Fed averages […]