(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts)
Kevin Drum discusses single parent households

Disqus won’t let me comment, so I post my comment on this post hereI am honestly impressed that you didn’t mention lead. So I will. The single parent household peak came later than the murder peak — as one would expect. Single parent households last (until another marriage & good luck with that Ms single mom). You graph a stock (OK 3 stocks) each correspond to flows — births to single moms and separations of couples. Teenage births peak when the girls (and 18 and 19 year old women) in queston had maximum lead exposure as babies and toddlers. The boys (and men) aren’t always even identified on birth certificates, but ages of mothers and fathers are usually

By Josepth Joyce
The Continuing Dominance of the Dollar
Ten years after the global financial crisis, we are still coming to an understanding of how profound a shock it was. The changes in political alignments within and across nations and the diminished public support for globalization continue. But one aspect of the financial system has not changed: the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the monetary system.
An article by Fernando Eguren Martin, Mayukh Mukhopadhyay and Carlos van Hombeeck of the Bank of England in the BOE’s Quarterly Bulletin documents the different international roles of the dollar. First, it continues to be the main currency in central bank reserves, with a share of about 70% of total holdings. Second, the dollar is used as an invoicing

Weekly Indicators for October 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha

 – by New Deal democrat

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.

Unsurprisingly, the big story this week was the jump in interest rates.

As always, clicking on the link and reading the post is not only informative, but helps put a little cash in my wallet.

A thought for Sunday: Trump is stomping all over the GOP’s message
If the Congressional GOP had their druthers, they would probably like the autumn mid-term narrative to be about a strong economy, low unemployment, a tax cut, and a big increase in military funding. In vulnerable districts, they’d like to run on local issues, as would GOPers running for state and local offices.
But I knew that was never going to happen, because Trump wants the spotlight to be on him and him alone, 24/7 and always.
So it was inevitable that he was going to stomp all over whatever narrative the GOP wanted to tell, with controversey after controversy after controversy.
And look, according to Gallup, what it’s done to his approval numbers:

He’s right back at the low point he

Housing: comprehensive review of August reports

– by New Deal democratI pay particular attention to housing because it is ian important long leading indicator for the economy.
And more and more evidence is accumulating  — although it is not universal — that housing may have passed its peak in this cycle. Last year housing was resued by an autumn surge. I don’t think that will happen this year, but there are conflicting signals.
My comprehensive review of that evidence is up at Seeking Alpha.
As usual, your clicking over and reading hopefully will be educational. It will also reward me, ever so slightly, for the work I do putting this stuff together.

By Brad Delong (originally published at Grasping at Reality with at least Theree Hands)
BRETT KAVANAUGH: A MULTIPLE TRAIN WRECK IN MANY DIMENSIONS: MONDAY SMACKDOWN

I confess that I have been procrastinating on various things. Why? Because I have been unable to tear my eyes away from the multiple train crash that is the confirmation process… the career… the life of Brett Kavanaugh. My view of this is a third- or fourth-hand view. It is the view of Georgetown Prep from Sidwell Friends. And it may well be wrong. But I think that it is right. So, with that warning, here goes:
The first… oddity… is Brett Kavanaugh‘s reaction to Christine Blasey Ford. It really ought to have been something like this:

I cannot say that I have a good memory of this, and I

Weekly Indicators for September 10 -14 at Seeking Alpha
– by New Deal democratMy Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
An anomalous surge in demand deposits led to one of the 5 biggest weekly jumps in M1 money supply ever as reported by the Federal Reserve this week.
By clicking on the link and reading, you help reward me for my work by putting a penny or two in my pocket.

Mainstream Economics become the celebration of the wealthy rentier class
To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone complains about inequality, but nobody does anything about it.
What they do is to use “inequality” as a takeoff point to project their own views on how to make society more prosperous and at the same time more equal. These views largely depend on whether they view the One Percent as innovative, smart and creative, making wealth by helping the rest of society – or whether, as the great classical economists wrote, the wealthiest layer of the population consist of rentiers, making their income and wealth off the 99 Percent as idle landlords, monopolists and predatory bankers.

Via AOL is an interesting program:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is testing a new “presidential alert” system nationwide for the first time next week that will make it possible for Donald Trump to directly message nearly everyone in the nation who has a cell phone.
Officials insisted that the system cannot be used for political purposes. FEMA also assured people that it can’t track cell phone users’ locations through the alert system.
No one with a cell phone can opt out of presidential alerts.
The Wireless Emergency Alert system message test is being carried out by FEMA in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, FEMA said in a statement posted on its website Thursday.

By New Deal democrat
August producer data goes in the opposite direction from the consumer

I have a new post, “Producers are Hot*, but Consumers Maybe Not,” up at Seeking Alpha.

in which I contrast the white hot ISM manufacturing report with the lackluster motor vehicle sales and residential construction — the two biggest durable consumer purchases.

As usual, not only is reading it hopefully informative, but also compensates me a little bit for the work I put in.

August jobs report: overall progress, with some new highs and some givebacks

– by New Deal democrat

HEADLINES:
+201,000 jobs added
U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.9%
U6 underemployment rate declined -0.1% from 7.5% to 7.4% (NEW EXPANSION LOW)
Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment:

Wages and participation rates
Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  rose 226,000 from 5.163 million to 5.379 million
Part time for economic reasons: fell -188,000 from 4.567 million to 4.379 million
Employment/population ratio ages 25-54: declined -0.2% from 79.5% to 79.3%
Average Weekly Earnings for Production and Nonsupervisory Personnel: rose $.07 from  $22.66 to $22.73, up +2.8% YoY.  (Note: you may be reading different

By Joseph Joyce
The Euro At Twenty: Mody’s EuroTragedy
The euro will mark its twentieth anniversary in 2019. Is this a cause of celebration and congratulations? Or a case of a well-intentioned policy gone awry? Ashoka Mody in his new book , EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, offers an account that shows that the joint currency was flawed from the outset, and has been further weakened by poor policy choices.
Mody, a distinguished research economist at the IMF for many years, is currently the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. His book is a combination of scholarship and storytelling, as Mody analyzes the background of the euro, its evolution and future

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for August 27 – 31 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
Several of the long leading indicators have deteriorated further.

by New Deal democrat
Even if the yield curve tightens no further, there will be consequences next year

Both my posts from yesterday morning and today dealt with two aspects of the implications of the Fed raising rates.

The unifying idea beneath both of them is that the Fed’s raising rates is already having consequences in the economy; consequences that are likely to be amplified should the Fed continue on its present path.

And we have a pretty good idea what those consequences are likely to be, beyond employment. Four times in the 1980s and 1990s the yield curve tightened to right about where it is now, without going into full inversion or heralding an ensuing recession.

I wrote what I hope is a tour de force laying out in much fuller form what is

by New Deal democrat
New and existing home sales for July 2018: UPDATED with link
Both new and existing home sales for July came in low. New home sales were at a 9 month low, and existing home sales at a 2 year low:

That’s enough for both series to be scored as negatives, although the new home sales downturn could easily be revised away, and existing home sales are the least important of all housing indicators.
I’ll have a full analysis of all home sales indicators up at Seeking Alpha, and when it comes online, I will link to it.
UPDATE: and here’s the link!

Can the Fed successfully steer between Scylla and Charybdis? An update

As I type this, the spread between 2 year and 10 year Treasuries is back to 0.25%, the level below which I switch my rating on the yield curve from positive to neutral. Already the spread is tight enough that, even if it never inverts, it suggests a slowdown in the next 6-12 months, as happened in 1984 and 1995 in the graph below of real YoY GDP growth and the Fed funds rate:

One aspect of what is happening in the bond market is that the 2 to 10 year spread is reaching equivalent levels at higher and higher absolute yields.  Here’s a graph I generated last week, where I normed both the 2 and 10 year Treasury yields to zero at a point where the spread between them was 0.30%: