Taxes Up 30%! A couple of months ago yours truly complained a bit about some fiscal dishonesty coming from Team Trump: He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in […]
Could an Oil Patch decline turn a 2019 slowdown into an outright recession? One of the items I mentioned in my piece yesterday at Seeking Alpha was the recent big decline in oil prices. Please go read the piece, it puts a couple of pennies in my pocket! But in that article I referenced the […]
Back down from the mountains where it was snowing yesterday, a silent beauty. Sitting in my daughter’s kitchen drinking a cup of Keurig manufactured coffee. The household is quiet as I think about the events of the last months and attempt to pen a few words. Washington is still shut down and one man pouts. […]
On the Front Lines of Climate Change: Old White Homeowners, Many of them Upper Class The other night I was sitting at home, locked in a conversation about climate change and race. How is this a racial issue, I asked? I realize that the society I live in has pervasive racism, and one should always […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh […]
by New Deal democrat The Fed scrapes Scylla after careening into Charybdis In the past several years, I have described the Fed as trying to steer in between the Scylla of a yield curve inversion and the Charybdis of higher rates wounding the housing market.Recently several trends have reversed. This offers some relief to housing, […]
November housing permits boosted by multifamily dwellings November was a *relatively* good month for housing permits, as in, improved *relative* to most of this year, although not at the heights of last winter. Most importantly, the least volatile number, single family permits, was flat compared with last month, and down -2% from a year ago: […]
11 years after the huge financial rescue operation, procrastinators look at the cost to the Treasury. The numbers are gigantic. Also the cost was negative. Saving the financial system and preventing a second great depression was, I think, the most profitable trade in human history by far. Crude accounting suggests this, but there are two […]
The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days. Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced […]