Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Brett Crosby currently serves as Region IV Director for the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, representing Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. He taps into the current trends in the beef market from a producer side, and I couldn’t have said it any better than he has in his opinion piece in Northern Ag Network. Here’s Brett: A blog post published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on July 12, 2022, claimed that Congress is “rushing” to consider “aggressive...

“September consumer inflation: primarily a function of the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” plus new cars”  – by New Deal democrat Since last November I’ve been hammering the fact that the official CPI measure of housing inflation, “owners’ equivalent rent,” seriously lagged, as in by a year or more, actual house prices as measured by the most popular housing indexes. At the time I wrote that OER was only up 3.1% YoY and core inflation...

The point of this post is that I see an odd consensus about the conclusion based on opposite assumptions. The conclusion is the standard conclusion that US inflation is currently definitely too high and that it is necessary to reduce it even at the risk of a recession. First the US public considers current US inflation to be a very bad problem. It is easy to see why. Normal people use “inflation” to mean price inflation and assume given...

Six billion. I have written and rewritten the first line of this over and over and over again. Six billion. That is the amount of current US dollars American farmers have to come up with this year as fertilizer prices hit highs not seen since 2008, on top of higher prices last year. The difference is that in 2008 we had a financial meltdown, a run on energy markets, and global calamity. This year, we have supply crunches due to war, restrictions,...

Coronavirus dashboard for October 5: An autumn lull as COVID-19 evolves towards seasonal endemicity  – by New Deal democrat Back in August I highlighted some epidemiological work by Trevor Bedford about what endemic COVID is likely to look like, based on the rate of mutations and the period of time that previous infection makes a recovered person resistant to re-infection. Here’s his graph: He indicated that it “illustrate[s] a scenario...

Report From Moscow by Barkley Rosser  My wife, Marina, has returned from a two and a half week to Moscow to visit her 93 year old mother.  She almost got bumped from her Turkish Airlines flight out of Moscow through Istanbul, but her travel agent managed to get her back on.  Very glad she is back. Anyway, a few first hand current reports. Yes, in terms of living standards, in Moscow most things are operating and there are plenty of goods in...

Neofascist Giorgia Meloni will be the next Italian Prime minister. I feel I have to write about this being in Rome, but I am clueless as to how it happened (I wasn’t optimistic a year ago – I was expecting authoritarian xenophobe demagogue Matteo Salvini to be the next Italian prime minister — I guess the photo of him wearing a Vladimir Putin T-shirt when on Red Square might have cost him the authoritarian but not that authoritarian vote). A much...

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has an interview up with Peter Dorman about his new book on climate policy, Alligators in the Arctic and How To Avoid Them.  I haven’t read the book yet, but Peter shared some of his writing on climate with me a few years ago when I was trying to learn a bit about the topic, and I am sure the book is excellent.  Peter is an engaging writer, very knowledgeable about climate issues, interdisciplinary in his...

Kind of a mixed bag of what news was showing up in My In-Box. It was evenly spread amongst various topics. Ford building a battery plant just like everyone else is planning. Wall Street buying up residential homes. That purchasing of houses will come to no-good for the average citizen. ACA Preventive is under threat by a looney federal judge in Texas and SCOTUS has to decide. Non-Opioid pain treatment sounds like a good idea. If you do not like the...

Review of “Demagogue”“Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” by Larry Tye is a particularly timely read as the nation continues in the grip of another political bully, Donald Trump. The parallels in their methods are striking and the degree to which McCarthy held the nation in thrall during the 1950s mirrors the fealty of the Trumpenproletariat today. We know how the McCarthy story ended, and it offers hope that the nation will...