Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Four week average of initial claims drops below “yellow flag” level, for now  – by New Deal democrat While GDP will get the lion’s share of attention today (and I’ll post on it later on), by and large it is a look in the rear view mirror. The more forward-looking data is weekly jobless claims. This week initial claims declined -16,000 last week to 230,000. The more important 4 week average declined -4,000 to 236,000. Continuing claims, with...

I was doing some Angry Bear housecleaning and ran across this post by Barkley questioning whether trump would leave the presidency upon after his loss. This post was written by Barkley November 10th. In keeping with his requirements to wait on posting Econospeak’s commentaries, AB was to wait a day or two. Barkley had a series of posts along similar lines about trump. Of course, we all know trump did not attempt a Coup. Indeed, he incited an...

voting 217 Yes 215 no the House has passed a bill which would increase the debt ceiling, slash spending, and repeal (most of) the IRA. This ends the fun period when we could laugh at Republicans for demanding that Biden negotiate without themselves making a bargaining proposal. The bill is horrible. I am a Democrat in disarray trying to figure out how to respond (and who should respond). One possibility is to stick to the position that there...

 Are Home Sales Bottoming? – by New Deal democrat For the past few months, I have speculated that home sales were bottoming. This morning’s report on March new home sales put an exclamation mark on that idea.New home sales increased 57,000 in March (from a February level downwardly revised by -17,000) to 683,000 annualized (blue in the graph below). The increasing trend in sales from the bottom of 543,000 last July at this point seems crystal...

Llyod Alter formerly of Treehugger was the one I would always read on Treehugger. I would say this goes back a couple of decades. I was writing my stuff in the comments section of Slate’s Moneybox or The Best of the Fray. Somehow Treehugger became associated with Slate and I picked up on them and Lloyd. In a most unceremonious way Lloyd was riffed out of Treehugger after many years. For all of his years at Treehugger Lloyd was let go in a rather...

House prices on track to go negative YoY by summer, despite monthly increase in February  – by New Deal democrat House prices through February as measured by both the FHFA (gold in the graphs below) and Case Shiller (red) Indexes rose, the former by 0.5% (after a downwardly revised 0.1% in January), and the latter by 0.2% (after a -0.2% decline in January). Here’s what the monthly changes look like for each, as compared with Owners’ Equivalent...

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry, Angry Bear Two Years ago As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance and/or Medicare Advantage and ACOs? Commercial Healthcare Insurance and Medicare...

Much of this article I rewrote to make it clearer for the reader. It is written by upper management. I do disagree with the conclusions. Throwing more money at healthcare is not going to solve the issues he discusses. The article praises Commercial Healthcare Insurance who pay more for patient care and whose costs are twice Medicare of which much is administrative cost. The issue is not Medicare or Medicare. The issue is the cost of the...

Income tax withholding payments stumble again  – by New Deal democrat The important data this week will include new home sales tomorrow, Q1 GDP and initial jobless claims on Thursday, and most importantly of all (imo) real personal income and spending, along with real manufacturing and trade sales on Friday. In the meantime, today let me take another look at a significant coincident indicator, income tax withholding payments, because the...

EVs and S&DCs: USPS says you can’t have one without the other, Save the Post Office, Steve Hutkins The Postal Service is using the very popular plan to buy electric vehicles (EVs) to justify its very unpopular plan to relocate carriers to Sorting & Delivery Centers (S&DCs). In press releases, news articles, and presentations to business mailers, the two plans are being yoked together, as if you can’t have one without the other....