Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Industrial production continues to decelerate Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators. In dating the onset and end of recessions, in practice the NBER relies upon industrial production more than any other measure. March 2019 production continued a string of recent disappointments, with overall production declining -0.1%, and manufacturing production unchanged. For the first quarter of 2019 in total, overall production declined -0.3%,...

Is Stephen Moore a Gold Bug? A lot of the criticisms of putting the twin village idiots known as Herman Cain and Stephen Moore on the FED assert that they are gold bugs. Kate Riga watched CNN when Erin Burnett interviewed Stephen Moore on this allegation: Stephen Moore tries to flip-flop on the gold standard — but Erin Burnett is prepared and armed with a montage of his past statements Watch and enjoy! Now Moore did say he would prefer targeting an...

Economics, the Realm of Money and the Significance of GDP Growth, with an Application to Child Labor What’s economics?  There are two answers.  One is it’s the sphere of human activity encompassing the production and distribution of goods and services, which has sometimes been referred to as provisioning.  This is quite a lot but not everything.  It includes meditation classes but not meditation, making and selling binoculars but not bird-watching,...

Elizabeth Warren Wants to Collect More in Corporate Profits Taxes John Harwood reports: Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposes raising $1 trillion in government revenue from a new tax on profits of the largest corporations. The proposed surtax would prevent Amazon and other companies with profits exceeding $100 million from wiping out their tax liabilities altogether. Instead of taxable corporate income as defined by the IRS, the 7%...

Real wages got gassed in March The consumer price index rose +0.4% in March, mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. That really shouldn’t have been a surprise, since almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did in March — up 9% for the month — consumer prices as a whole have gone up at least +0.4%. I’m showing just the last 10 years in the graph below: In fact, ex-gas, consumer inflation ex-energy has been...

In a low inflation world firms tend to raise prices once a year, typically in the first quarter of the calendar year or their fiscal year.   Because of this very strong seasonal pattern, on a not seasonally adjusted  around 50% of the annual increase in the core CPI —  excluding food and energy — occurs in the first quarter This very strong pattern gives great insight in to the annual inflation rate. One, is if this year’s first quarter is greater than...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.  Interest rates ticked up this week, which brought the readings on some interest rate indicators back down. As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me with a little $$$ for my efforts.

March jobs report: good nowcast, concerning forecast HEADLINES: +196,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.8% U6 underemployment rate unchanged at  7.3% Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession   I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown is coming. The following more leading numbers in the report tell us about where the economy is likely to be a few months...

March news good so far; the Fed has plenty of scope to cut rates While we are waiting for tomorrow’s jobs report, let’s step back for a moment and look at where we are in the big picture of the economic cycle. So far, March data is running pretty positive.  In addition to the decent ISM manufacturing report I discussed the other day, motor vehicle sales turned out to be excellent, topping 18 million annualized: The ISM services index, like the...

Watch for temp jobs weakness in Friday’s employment report Yesterday I looked at manufacturing jobs, and goods-producing jobs generally, as two what to look for in Friday’s jobs report. Today let’s follow up with temporary jobs, an acknowledged leading indicator for jobs as a whole. As I wrote about a couple of months ago, the American Staffing Association’s Staffing Index does a good job forecasting the trend in temporary jobs in the monthly employment...