Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

The simple Fed funds + payrolls leading indicator: autumn update While we are waiting for tomorrow’s jobs report, let me update my alternative Fed funds + payrolls leading indicator for the economy, which I debuted earlier this year. This was the result of looking for an interest rate indicator that did not rely upon the yield curve. This indicator is really simple, and what it predicts is, if the Fed fate rises YoY by as much as the YoY% change in jobs...

Trump’s trade war isn’t hurting manufacturing . . . yet The Trump Administration’s trade war hasn’t hurt manufacturing and production yet. At least that’s the message from this morning’s ISM report on manufacturing. According to the ISM: The September PMI®registered 59.8 percent, a decrease of 1.5 percentage points from the August reading of 61.3 percent. The New Orders Index registered 61.8 percent, a decrease of 3.3 percentage points from the August...

I Was Wrong: US-Mexico Trade Deal Lives With Canada: USMCA Rarher Than NAFTA At the last minute last night the US and Canada cut a deal, so now Canada is on on the deal to change NAFTA to USMCA.  I think the name change is the biggest part of it, even though Trump still claims that NAFTA was “the worst trade deal ever” and the new deal makes relatively minor changes in it, especially if one considers what would have been the case if the US had actually...

Housing: comprehensive review of August reports – by New Deal democratI pay particular attention to housing because it is ian important long leading indicator for the economy. And more and more evidence is accumulating  — although it is not universal — that housing may have passed its peak in this cycle. Last year housing was resued by an autumn surge. I don’t think that will happen this year, but there are conflicting signals. My comprehensive review of...

The *rate* of new jobless claims, at all-time lows, forecasts even lower unemployment I thought I’d start out with something I haven’t looked at in awhile: initial jobless claims as a share of the population and as a leading indicator for the unemployment rate. This economic expansion has featured two contrary extremes in the labor market: low wage growth and increasingly vanishing layoffs (I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but that’s a subject for...

The US-Mexico Trade Deal Dies Nobody is calling it that, but the low key story on the back pages of Wednessday’s major papers report that this is what has happened, not to my surprise.  September 29 (or maybe the 30th at a stretch) is the deadline for President Trump to submit to the Congress the final version of the US-Mexico trade deal if there is any chance of it being passed by the US Senate in time for outgoing Mexican President Pena Nieto to sign...

A Weak Defense of Citizen United: Ownership v. Control Many thanks to Peter Dorman for highlighting Citizens United As Bad Corporate Law. I guess we had to endure this comment, which is a really weak rebuttal: Corporate shareholders are most definitely owners; they alone have the authority to sell their shares or the company’s assets. Their rights are based not on contract law but statutory rules of franchise. They are guaranteed rights of assembly abd...

Citizens United, Thoroughly Debunked I admit I haven’t paid too much attention to debates over Citizens United, since I regard the direction taken by regulation, control over who may contribute to political campaigns and how much they can put up, to be misguided.  I would like to see comprehensive control over how much money can be spent on behalf of candidates, period.  (I would also like to see a mandate that all such contributions be funneled through...

A bold forecast: there will be no autumn surge in housing this year The big issue this year in housing is whether increased mortgage rates and higher prices have merely resulted in a deceleration in the increase in new housing sales and construction, or whether housing is actually rolling over. As I’ve written several times in the last month, there is accumulating evidence that it is actually the latter: housing has at very least plateaued. The acid...

A hypothesis for Prof. Krugman: the transmission method was FEAR In his recent column disagreeing with Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman asks for an explanation as to how a financial panic could lead to years thereafter of a slow recovery. Specifically, Krugman says that he “really really wants to hear about the transmission mechanism.” After all, the financial panic eased in 2009. And yet, outside of the very noteworthy exceptions of corporate profits...