– by New Deal democrat Consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and retail sales is our first wide measure of that spending. And since consumption leads employment, it is an important real world measure. In May, after two months of being dominated by gas prices, it was even more decisively driven by a likely […]

“Updating the long leading indicators: corporate profits, and housing.”  – by New Deal democrat This week I’m spending some time updating the non-financial long leading indicators. As I wrote on Monday, I haven’t updated these in a while in large part because the chaos coming out of Washington has blindsided much of the economic data. There’s […]

 – by New Deal democrat New economic data will resume tomorrow. Since I haven’t updated the impact of Tariff-palooza! on transport and spending in awhile, let’s take a look at that. The “tip of the spear” is container shipping. Here’s a graph of traffic at the busiest ports in the US, from CNBC: At the busiest […]

Why So Much Deficit Spending by the nation? This is here for another reason. The big issue I saw in the last election was the deficit spending by government. Much of it was due to the 2017 Tax Breaks put in place by then President Donald Trump 10 years earlier. This was passed by Republicans […]

A bit behind here as other things have distracted me in AZ. Health being one of them. A double dose of excellent reviews of the economy today. If there is one commentary (if you are rushed) on Angry Bear you should read concerning the economy, it is NDd’s reporting. Spending and Unemployment are in the […]

Spending soars, income stagnates, savings sink like the Titanic  – by New Deal democrat Real life intruded yesterday, so I didn’t put up any information about the Q3 GDP report. I’ll write in detail next week, but in the meantime there were 4 basic highlights: 1. Obviously it was an excellent report overall. 2. The […]

Real income continues to set records, while real spending and real total sales falter  – by New Deal democrat Real personal spending faltered in May, and real total sales continued to falter in April, as of this morning’s report; while real personal income continued to be aided by the big decline in gas prices that […]