Tag Archives: Hot Topics

I do not have an exact date when this was written. It appears to have been update May 2021. I find it interesting as US automakers are making moves to switch from combustion powered vehicles to electrically powered vehicles utilizing rechargeable batteries to provide the power. US automaker Ford is so committed to this conversion; it has split its company into two parts. One part for combustion driven vehicles and another for battery powered...

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...

If you believe railroads do not count much anymore in the American economy, you need to rethink your thought. For a major automotive company, I was coordinating shipments to and from Asia via container, rail, and ocean. It was not that hard if you understood the lead times, customs, shipping and rail, and the bottlenecks. Typically we would pick up or ship out of Long Beach or LA. Coming in to us would arrive by rail with the bottleneck being...

The Ukraine war spike in energy prices has completely unwound  – by New Deal democrat I plan on putting up a Coronavirus update later today, because there have been a few significant developments (No, the pandemic is *NOT* over) particularly as they relate to the next few months. Tomorrow and Wednesday, we get our first batch of monthly housing data. In the meantime, today let’s update the situation with energy prices. And here, the news is...

Real aggregate payrolls and recessions  – by New Deal democrat One of my favorite indicators for the overall economic health of the American working and middle classes is real aggregate payrolls for non-supervisory workers. This is kind of self-explanatory. Rather than measure hourly wages, this is the *total* amount of wages paid to non-supervisory workers, adjusted for inflation. It tends not to be noisy, i.e., there is a lot of signal...

August industrial production declines; overall decelerating trend consistent with recession in 2023  – by New Deal democrat Finishing today’s data dump, industrial production, the King of Coincident Indicators, declined -0.2% in August, while manufacturing production increased 0.1%. July’s sharp gains in both were revised slightly (-0.1%) downward:  While July remains the high water mark for overall production, manufacturing has not made a...

Positive real retail sales in August, but YoY flatness continues  – by New Deal democrat Retail sales, probably my favorite monthly economic datapoint, increased 0.3% in August. Since consumer prices rose 0.1%, real retail sales rose 0.2%: That’s certainly good news. Now here’s the bad news: July’s retail sales were revised downward by -0.4%, so that real retail sales, reported last month as +0.1%, are now shown down by a little less than...

I have been following New Deal democrat for a long time now. What NDd is reporting in this post is a big deal going into November’s Elections. In spite of all the negativism being reported by political interests, the economy is still moving forward. People are still working. I keep having to remind people about what 2008 was about. The last two years could have been far worse. run75441 Improvement in initial jobless claims continues  – by...

A lot of informational news deposited in my In-Box this week. Nothing this week is taken from anywhere else. I think last week, I included one news article from the outside. Political, Economic, Healthcare news are my mainstays. The usual economics and business news coming from different sources. Yes, inflation is still an issue. I do not believe Powell will not give us a soft landing he thinks he is capable of doing. One issue will help...