Weekly Indicators for December 3 – 7 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
The long leading forecast has now been negative for four weeks in a row. Please remember that clicking and reading, besides being educational, helps reward me for the work I put into this.

Brookings Institute points us to:
Big, techy metros like San Francisco, Boston, and New York with populations over 1 million have flourished, accounting for 72 percent of the nation’s employment growth since the financial crisis. By contrast, many of the nation’s smaller cities, small towns, and rural areas have languished. Smaller metropolitan areas (those with populations between 50,000 and 250,000) have contributed less than 6 percent of the nation’s employment growth since 2010 while employment remains below pre-recession levels in many ‘micro’ towns and rural communities (those with populations less than 50,000).
Two graphs demonstrate part of the geography of markets and growth. Of course even the 1 per cent metros have divergent economic trends

(Dan here….better a little late than not…)
by Kenneth Thomas  
Amazon Wins!!!

Well, what did you expect? With 238 entrants and 20 finalists, the Amazon HQ2 location tournament resulted in a resounding victory for Amazon: Billions of dollars in subsidies and binders full of detailed information on the contestants. Plus, we got a surprise twist at the end, when Amazon announced it would choose two “headquarters” instead of one. Of course, I never thought that having two headquarters made economic sense (“Doesn’t that defeat the idea of a headquarters as a central coordinating site?” I asked last year), and the same is even truer when you have three “headquarters.”
Leaving aside how Amazon plans to coordinate three headquarters’ operations, the subsidies

By Joseph Joyce
U.S. Interest Rates and Global Banking in Emerging Market Economies

The spillover effects of changes in U.S. interest rates are widely recognized (see here and  here). An increase in rates, for example, raises the cost of dollar-denominated financing outside the U.S., which has grown in recent years, while an appreciation of the dollar makes such debt even more expensive to service and refinance. The emerging markets are among the nations adversely affected by the rise in U.S. interest rates. Several recent research papers have shown how global bank lending in these economies is affected.
Stefan Avdjiev, Cathérine Koch, Patrick McGuire and Goetz von Peter of the Bank for International Settlements investigate the impact of a change in U.S.

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Via Bill McBride at Calculated Risk:
Climate Change Report

This is a critical threat and should be a nonpartisan issue.
Here is the Fourth National Climate Assessment. An excerpt on the economic impact:
In the absence of significant global mitigation action and regional adaptation efforts, rising temperatures, sea level rise, and changes in extreme events are expected to increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property, labor productivity, and the vitality of our communities. Regional economies and industries that depend on natural resources and favorable climate conditions, such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries, are vulnerable to the growing impacts of climate change. Rising temperatures are projected to reduce the efficiency

Via Naked Capitalism and Lambert Strether:
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. –Corinthians 13:13
I posted this letter in Links, but I found I could expand on it. Spectrum Health Care’s letter to Hedda Martin speaks for itself, and for what our health care system has become under neoliberalism:
View image on Twitter

Dan [email protected]

(The provenance: I started with AOC, who hat-tipped @DanRiffle, who linked to the original poster, @DanRadzikowski, quoted above. From Radzikowski’s thread, Hedda Martin: “This is me”; Martin’s GoFundMe, which was successful.) In this post, I’ll focus on two things: the intriguing backstory of Spectrum Health, the institution that denied Martin care

by New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for November 19 -23 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Conditions among the long leading indicators continue to slowly deteriorate.
As usual, clicking over and reading not only is educational as to the current and future state of the economy, but helps reward me with a few $$$ for my efforts.

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts)
by Robert Waldmann
I disagree with Jennifer Rubin

Conservatives object to the Washington Post defining never-ever-ever Trumper Jennifer Rubin as a conservative. Reflecting, I had to admit that I hadn’t disagreed with anything she wrote for months. Now, finally, I do. But, sadly, this isn’t evidence that she is still a conservative. She has clearly become a radical centrist third way mugwump (RC3WM).She argues that the 2018 blue wave shows that Democrats should reject Bernie Sanders and rely on a poll conducted by “The Third Way”.
I think this is nonsense consisting entirely of setting up an oxymoronic straw man and pretending that values shared by conservatives, liberals, centrists, progressives,

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for November 12 – 16 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators piece is up at Seeking Alpha.
If my reference frames are well- constructed, economic trends ought to start out in the long leading forecast, then start to show up in the short leading forecast, and finally make it through to the coincident nowcast.
Almost 6 months ago, the long leading forecast changed from positive to neutral for the first time.  It’s been flirting with further deterioration ever since.  Well, this week ….
As usual, clicking through and reading is a way to help support my putting in the effort to describe and forecast the economy for you.

By New Deal democrat
Credit remains loose, but big borrowers aren’t interested; real consumer spending may be stalling

We interrupt this coverage of the ongoing Trump Boom (c) to advise you that two more long leading indicators, while still positive, are showing at least some weaknesses.  This story is up at Seeking Alpha.
As usual, reading the story over there is both informative for you and a little $$$ revwarding for me.
Also, as an aside, once corporate profits for Q3 are reported in two weeks as part of the revised GDP report, that will be a good time to do a comprehensive update of the long leading forrecast through 2019.

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for November 5 – 9 at Seeking Alpha
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
Interest rattes rose even further this past week, portend further erosion in the housing market.
As usual, not only does reading this post give you of the up-to-the-moment view of the economy, but it also put a little extra $$$ in my pocket.

Via VOX comes this noteworthy WH official attempt to propogandize:

Press secretary Sarah Sanders shared an altered video (italics mine) on Wednesday evening that appears to have originated with far-right conspiracy site Infowars to justify banning CNN reporter Jim Acosta from the White House after a tense exchange with President Donald Trump.
…
When Trump insulted Acosta at the press conference, a White House intern approached him and tried to physically remove a microphone from his hands. Their arms touched as the woman reached across Acosta’s body to grab the microphone he was holding in his hand.
Looking back at the video, it does not in fact show Acosta “placing his hands” on the woman. But about 90 minutes after she posted her string of tweets,

(Dan here…better a bit late than ….)
by Barkley Rosser
Monday Before The Midterms And WaPo Is At It Again

It is Robert J. Samuelson doing his usual schtick, albeit with some recognition of other issues, such as global warming and immigration.  But these are not what has his prime attention on the day before midterm elections in the US.  Moaning that “Everyone” will lose this election, his main focus is on the budget deficit, without a single mention of the Trump tax cuts.
We get, “Start with budget deficits. In fiscal 2018, the gap between federal spending and revenue was $782 billion, nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). That’s up $116 billion from 2017. Based on current spending and taxes, the Congressional Budget Office expects large

By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics)
Economists Agree: Democratic Presidents are Better at Making Us Rich. Eight Reasons Why.
In 2013, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson — no wild-eyed liberals, they — asked a very important question: Why has the U.S. economy performed better under Democratic than Republican presidents, “almost regardless of how one measures performance”?
Start with their “performed better” assertion: it’s uncontestable. While you can easily cherry-pick brief periods and economic measures that show superior economic performance under Republicans, over any lengthy comparison period (say, 25 years more), by pretty much any economic measure, Democrats have outperformed Republicans for a century. Even Tyler Cowen, director of

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for October 29 – November 2 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators piece is up at Seeking Alpha.
Several areas, like rail traffic, saw significant rebounds. But interest rates also rose to new expansion highs as well.
As usual, not only does clicking and reading the article bring you up to the moment on what is happening with the economy, it also helps put a little $$$ in my account.

By Joseph Joyce
The 2018 Globie: “Crashed”

Each year I choose a book to be the Globalization Book of the Year, i.e., the “Globie”. The prize is strictly honorific and does not come with a check. But I do like to single out books that are particularly insightful about some aspect of globalization.  Previous winners are listed at the bottom.
This year’s choice is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze of Yale University. Tooze, an historian, traces the events leading up to the crisis and the subsequent ten years. He points out in the introduction that this account is different from one he may have written several years ago. At that time Barak Obama had won re-election in 2012 on the basis of a slow but steady recovery in

By New Deal democrat
Housing has peaked*

*(unless the Fed lowers interest rates)My comprehensive look at September housing data is up at Seeking Alpha. The downtrend in housing statistics has been sustained and severe enough for me to make the call that housing has peaked, by most measures, between last November and this past March.
This does not mean that I am calling for a recession at this time. But it does mean that this long leading indicator is now a firm negative. There are three constributing factors to this turn in the market:
1. Interest rates have risen (to roughly 5% for 30 year mortgages)
2. unlike 2014, when a similar but not quite so severe rise in interest rates only caused a temporary pasue in the market, house prices as a multiple of