Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Jobless claims: yet another week of glacial progress Today marked yet another week of glacial progress in initial jobless claims, at levels worse than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 5,312 to 804,307. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims fell by 9,000 to 840,000, another new pandemic low. The 4-week moving average also...

Voting in a Time of Covid: A Question about Judicial “Originalism” The originalist theory of legal interpretation holds that judges, in reviewing the implementation of a statute, should be guided by the “plain meaning” of its language at the time it was adopted.  This is in opposition to the notion of a “living law”, whose interpretation should evolve as the conditions it addresses evolves.  For instance, originalists are appalled by Supreme Court...

Happy Every Economic Statistic in the World Day! 1. Jobless claims continue making glacial progress 1. Jobless claims Another week of glacial progress in initial jobless claims, at levels worse than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims fell by -40,263 to 786,942. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims fell by -36,000 to 837,000, another new...

Coronavirus dashboard for September 30: a portrait of dismal societal failure I hear the WWE staged a helluva mud wrestling cage match last night! Since we won’t get any economic news until Every Statistic In The World is released tomorrow, in other, more uplifting news, let’s take the most updated look at coronavirus infections in the US. Total US infections: 7,190,230 Average infections last 7 days: 42,045 Total US deaths: 205,986 Average deaths last...

The real story revealed by the New York Times Trump tax returns bombshell is not that Donald Trump paid no taxes in 10 out of 15 years or that he paid $750 in 2016 and 2017. The real story is that he doesn’t have net income to service his debt. There is nothing inherently illegal about that. He did it before in the 1980s and when real estate prices stopped rising in 1990, his creditors were left holding the bag. Hyman Minsky wrote about Donald Trump’s...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance.” — Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” The photograph used in Andy Warhol’s 1964 print, “Race Riot” was taken by Charles Moore and was published in LIFE magazine in May of 1963. Warhol used it without permission […]

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The 2020 Presidential and Senate polling nowcast: Biden’s popular majority is congealing Here is my weekly update on the 2020 elections, based on State rather than national polling in the past 30 days, since that directly reflects what is likely to happen in the Electoral College. Remember that polls are really only nowcasts, not forecasts. […]

An Increasing Anomaly In The US Balance Of Payments  On Econbrowser Menzie Chinn has posted about an increase in the scale of US international net indebtedenss. Since the late 1980s the US has been a net debtor internationally, borrowing more from abroad then we are lending and investing there.  The increase in this net indebtedness has noticeably accelerated since our current POTUS took office, and especially this year.  The size of that net...

More on the bifurcation between the booming stock market and the bust of an economy  I wrote that new stock market highs in the face of the worst US economic downturn since the Great Depression were primarily a function of a few stocks that are particularly tied to the global economy rather than tethered to the US; that those stocks also benefited from delivering online content or physical stuff to homebound consumers; and that the background long...

by Joseph Joyce FDI in a Risky World The pandemic has shown that global supply chains are vulnerable to shocks. Output contracted as factories were closed in China and the impact was transmitted to firms further along the chains and the distributors of the final goods. Foreign direct investment had already slowed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and there were questions about its future (see here). How will multinational firms...