Both Amazon and Fed ex have embarked on plans to deliver their own “last mile” package delivery previously contracted with the US Post Office. Here is a link to run75441 (postmaster Mark Jamison’s) piece on this process Fake News, Flawed Analysis, and Bogus Tweets from 2018 for a much more complete description. I have pulled a quote from the more recent Business Insider post on “last mile” delivery.

According to the US Postal Service Inspector General, the new requirement to pre-fund retiree benefits accounted for $55 billion of the agency’s $62 billion loss incurred between 2007 and 2016.
Because of that, the Postal Service can’t make the massive investments into its logistics networks that its competitors have been able to.

Business Insider

By New Deal democrat
My preliminary long leading forecast through midyear 2020
This post is up at Seeking Alpha.
This is my first look at economic conditions into next summer. I suspect that it is contrary to most punditry that you will read.
In any event, as usual clicking over and reading helps reward me for the effort I put in to this endeavor.

By New Deal democrat
Q2 Credit conditions were decidedly mixed

Credit conditions are one of my categories of long leading indicators. I track the Chicago indexes weekly, but the more comprehensive Senior Loan Officer Survey only comes out once per quarter.
The 2nd Quarter Survey was published earlier this week. I have a post describing what it shows up at Seeking Alpha.
As usual, clicking on the link at reading should give you good information, and reward me with a little jingle.
P.S. I have all the graphs queued up and ready for my long leading forecast through midyear 2020. Now I just have to get motivated enough to write all the descriptions….

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts)
by Robert Waldmann
The optics are as bad as they look
 Dean “The Optics aren’t as bad as they look” Baquet just confirmed that he actually doesn’t do his job any more. He doesn’t decide what is on the front page of the New York Times. He doesn’t explain what he does (except force reporters to tone down their story on the Trump campaigns connections to Russia until it falsely asserted that the FBI had found no clear links *after* the FBI had obtained 2 FISA warrants based on probable cause to believe two Trump campaign employees (one of them campaign chairman) were foreign agents).Look, if he isn’t willing to edit, maybe his job should be eliminated as he eliminated the public editor, breaking a solemn

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts)
by Robert Waldmann
Nomoremisterniceblog almost states the bitter truth, but he’s too nice to tell us what fools we are.
He wrote:
I don’t want to relitigate the McGovern and Mondale campaigns, but Dukakis? “Free everything and impossible promises” weren’t what defeated him.
My comment
I want to relitigate events of 1984, which Delaney has sent down the memory hole. Mondale was not hammered because he made promises he couldn’t keep. He said he was going to talk to us like grownups. He said he was going to increase taxes (but not increase taxes on families with income under $ 30,000 which would be about $60,000 now with inflation).
So the people of the USA had to choose between a serious guy who told us the

By Joseph Joyce   (Joseph P. Joyce is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, where he holds the M. Margaret Ball Chair of International Relations. He served as the first Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs.)
The Change in the U.S. Direct Investment Position

The U.S. has long held an external balance sheet that is comprised of foreign equity assets, mainly in the form of direct investment (DI), and liabilities held abroad primarily in the form of debt, including U.S. Treasury securities. This composition is known “long equity, short debt.” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas of UC-Berkeley and Hélène Rey of the London Business School claim that this allocation has allowed the U.S. to serve as the “world’s venture

Dan here.  You will be reading more of him soon…David Zetland has contributed here on water issues via Aguanomics. He now publishes his blog The one-handed economist.  He is a native Californian who moved to Amsterdam several years ago. David is an assistant professor of political economy at Leiden University College, a liberal arts school located in The Hague. He teaches courses in social and business entrepreneurship, cooperation in the commons, and environmental, growth and development economics.
Here is a more informal piece on his newsletter:
News (30C in Amsterdam — and Europe is burning)
People usually say “Amsterdam is burning” for Pride week (starts tomorrow), but we’re really burning up. The last few days have seen record temperatures in the

By New Deal democrat
My forecast for the rest of 2019 is . . . .

. . . up at Seeking Alpha!
I’ll be doing my long term forecast through mid year 2020 once Q2 GDP comes out on Friday. It’ll probably get posted sometime next week.
P.S. Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday. I submitted the above to SA on Sunday, but they didn’t get around to putting it up until late yesterday afternoon.  If I have the energy, I’ll put up an extra post maybe this afternoon.

By New Deal Democrat
Weekly Indicators for July 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
There were a number a changes among the short leading indicators this week at the margins, in a somewhat surprising direction. Since I’ll be posting my semi-annual updates of my short and long term forecasts over the next week or two, there is a lot for me to think about!
Anyway, as usual, clicking over and reading should be educational for you, and also rewards me a little bit for the effort I put into this enterprise.

(Dan here… Via Real News Network, Bill Black discusses the what-ifs of President Trump’s policies in a spectacular contrast to current expectations…providing. a jumping off point from what we expect from the way it is framed now. I assume the complex interalationships of the wealthy elites (let us see how the Epstein case unwinds for another aspect) plays an important but not so well known role in this drama.  I find his thought his conclusions dismaying if even somewhat accurate.)
BILL BLACK: Sure. The question I ask in the article is why did Trump choose to be so spectacularly unpopular? Because had he done what he promised and had a true middle class tax cut that gave, for example, $5,000 a year to the typical middle class household, he would be

By New Deal democrat
The consumer vs. the producer economy
Prof. Edward Leamer wrote over a decade ago that, in a consumer led recession, first housing turns, then vehicle sales, then other consumer goods.
What do home and vehicle sales tell us now about the economy, vs. corporate profits? This post is up at Seeking Alpha.
As usual, clicking over and reading puts a penny or two in my pocket.

Via Evonomics, Steve Keen critiques Norhaus’s model for predicting economic damage per degree of average temperature rise….nerdy, and includes graphs and math, but worth a look.
By Steve Keen
This piece is part of a series from Steve Keen, Climate Change and the Nobel Prize in Economics: The Age of Rebellion. In the previous post, Keen noted the contrast between the urgency that Extinction Rebellion sees about limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees, and Nordhaus’s conclusion that the gap between the benefits of mitigating global warming and the costs is maximized at a 4 degree increase in global temperature. In this post, he delves into DICE itself.
DICE stands for “Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy”. It’s the mathematical

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for July 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.Now that the Fed has all but assured a dovish stance going forward, the longer term forecast has become even more positive.

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for July 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Lower long term interest rates continue to improve the long range forecast, while the short term forecast has deteriorated.
As usual, clicking over and reading puts a penny or two in my pocket to help reward me for my efforts.

Via Diane Ravitch’s blog is a link to this paper Great Britain school priveatization run amok.
In the course of the last quarter century, governmental entities in both the United States and England have sought to encourage educational innovation by creating publicly funded schools that are independent from many rules that apply to locally controlled schools. These schools are called charter schools in the United States and academy schools (academies) in England.
1 Private companies run a high percentage of these charter schools and academies. In the United States, these companies are commonly referred to as educational management organizations (EMOs).
2 In England, these organizations are called academy trusts (ATs).
3 EMOs and ATs frequently engage in

By Joseph Joyce
The Parting of Ways: The U.S. and China

The agreement of U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping to restart trade talks put offs planned increases of tariffs on Chinese exports. But there is little doubt that the U.S. intends to move ahead with its intention to undo the economic integration that has been underway since the 1990s. Even when it proves impossible to reverse history, the consequences of such a move will have long-lasting consequences for the global economy.
To understand what is at stake, think of the following simple guide to the status of the world’s nations in the aftermath of World War II. Countries separated into three groups, each anchored on its own tectonic plate. The “first world” consisted of