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...
Read More »Deep Structures of the Cultural Marxism Myth
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...
Read More »‘Adults in the Room’ by Varoufakis. Good, necessary and very frightening.
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...
Read More »Retail sales, Import and export prices, Business inventories, Housing index
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...
Read More »Open thread Aug. 15, 2015
Credit check
This kind of deceleration has always been associated with recession: Bending the curve: Actual lending continues to decelerate: So for the last 6 months the Fed is seeing a steep decline in credit growth and a softening in price pressures, wage growth, employment growth, auto sales, home sales and permits, retail sales, and personal income. Apart from that things are looking up!;)
Read More »Krugman and Mankiw on loanable funds — so wrong, so wrong
from Lars Syll A couple of years ago — in a debate with James Galbraith and Willem Buiter — Paul Krugman made it perfectly clear that he was a strong believer of the ‘loanable funds’ theory. Unfortunately, this is not an exception among ‘New Keynesian’ economists. Neglecting anything resembling a real-world finance system, Greg Mankiw — in his intermediate textbook Macroeconomics — more or less equates finance to the neoclassical thought-construction of a ‘market for loanable funds.’ On...
Read More »Disruption of comments 2
MEV is working this issue now….in a couple hours please leave feedback.
Read More »In light of Charlottesville, I noticed…
Exclusive: Trump to focus counter-extremism program solely on Islam … https://www.reuters.com/…/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv-idUSKBN15G… Feb 1, 2017 – The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government … Republicans wrestle with effort to cut Obamacare … Although CVE funding has been appropriated by Congress and the grant recipients were … Life After Hate, which rehabilitates former neo-Nazis and other domestic extremists....
Read More »The “Narratives” of Higgins’s “Warfare”
The word ‘narrative’ appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, “POTUS and Political Warfare.” Guys, it’s time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from...
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