Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from David Ruccio The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought — Rudi Dornbusch Last week, a wide variety of U.S. media (including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today) marked what they considered to be the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the global economic crisis—from which we still haven’t recovered.  The event in question, which occurred on 9 August 2007, was the announcement by international banking...

Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites? The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the racial superiority of the White man and the social, moral and political inferiority of Africans. This was...

The Confederacy stood for the forcible subjugation of other people. If there is a benefit to honoring the concept of or symbols for the Confederacy I don’t see it. Taking these symbols out of the public sphere is a net positive, even if some people are able to simultaneously a) disassociate those symbols from the oppression they represent and b) venerate those symbols. To be consistent, note that the radical Islamic ideology also calls for the...

Worse than expected, but modest growth from depressed levels. Highlights The Federal Reserve inadvertently released what is a weak July industrial production report about a 1/2 hour early this morning. Headline production rose 0.2 percent vs expectations for 0.3 percent with manufacturing output showing outright contraction, at minus 0.1 percent vs Econoday’s consensus for a 0.2 percent gain. Capacity utilization hit expectations at 76.7 percent. A 3rd straight decline in...

from Dean Baker Last week, I heard BBC announce the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis. This is dated to the decision by the French bank BNP Paribas to prohibit withdrawals from two hedge funds that were heavily invested in subprime mortgage backed securities. According to BBC, this was when lending began to freeze and house prices began to fall. The problem with BBC’s story is that house prices had already been falling for more than a year. While the nationwide...

Lower than expected, and, as always starts are ultimately determined by permits, which have been slowing as per the chart, which also reflects the deceleration in mortgage lending over the last 6 months: Highlights Housing starts couldn’t hold the 1.200 million annualized line in July, falling to a lower-than-expected 1.155 million. The rate is now back to the weakness of March and April in what may be emerging as a declining trend this year. Permits also fell but are...

Jeet Heer has posted a timely and excellent essay at New Republic titled “Trump’s Racism and the Cultural Marxism Myth.” In his essay, Heer recounts much of the background to the Higgins memo that I have documented here, here and here. Heer credits William S. Lind as the major popularizer of the myth, as have I in my blog posts. What I’m posting here extends the analysis and reveals significant background about personnel and timelines to the story. In my...

Yanis Varoufakis has written a book which shows that the European Union is, at present, disfunctional and does not live up to the treaties. The EU treaties are clear: “The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the...

The chart still looks weak to me. Shale boom in 2014 pumped it up, and then reversing with the shale bust, and still looking suspect after January when consumer credit further decelerated: Highlights The consumer was back in the stores last month in a July retail sales report, headlined by a 0.6 percent monthly gain, that not only exceeds top expectations but also includes sizable upward revisions. Nonstore retailers, vehicle dealers, building materials stores lead the...