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Highlights Chain stores are reporting mixed to lower year-on-year rates of November sales compared to October. Today’s results do not hint at another month of strength for the government’s ex-auto ex-gas retail sales reading which posted very strong monthly gains of 0.6 percent and 0.5 percent in October and September. Manufacturing muddling through at current levels: Markit Manufacturing PMI: Highlights Durable orders picked up in October and the momentum appears to...

from David Ruccio Back in 2010, Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job, exposed the failure of prominent mainstream economists who wrote about and spoke on matters of economic policy to disclose their conflicts of interest in the lead-up to the crash of 2007-08. Reuters followed up by publishing a special report on the lack of a clear standard of disclosure for economists and other academics who testified before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee...

So mortgage applications for purchases rose during the first half of the year, then reversed and are looking to be at best flat vs the year before come year end: Highlights Purchase applications for home mortgages fell just 0.2 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in the November 25 week following the prior week’s outsized 19-percent increase. But applications for refinancing were down 16 percent from the prior week, as the sharp post-election increase in interest rates...

From George Monbiot in The Guardian: Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them. The failure to get to grips with our crises, by all mainstream political parties, is likely to lead to a war between the major powers in my lifetime Over this time,...

On his insightful ‘conversable economist’ blog the excellent Timothy Taylor has a good piece about European unemployment which as follows: American readers: can you imagine the social turmoil in the US if the unemployment rate has been above 10% for the last seven years, instead of peaking at 10% back in October 2009 and falling down to about 5% by a year ago in fall 2015? Can you imagine if half of these unemployed had been looking for work for more than a year? Consider the difference,...

Revised up a bit as expected, pretty much all from revising up consumer spending. And it’s still a soybean export and inventory building story: Highlights The third quarter has gotten a meaningful upgrade. The second estimate is 3 tenths higher than the first, at a plus 3.2 percent annualized rate and which includes an upgrade for consumer spending and, in further good news, a downgrade in inventory growth. Personal consumption expenditures rose at a 2.8 percent pace in the...

from David Ruccio In the first installment of this series on “class before Trumponomics,” I argued that the recovery from the crash of 2007-08 created conditions that were favorable to capital at the expense of labor—and that trend represented a continuation of the class dynamic that had characterized the U.S. economy for decades, going back at least to the early 1980s. There are, of course, many details that were left out of that story, and I want to present a more fine-grained class...

from Asad Zaman PRELIMINARY REMARKS: Philosopher Hilary Putnam writes in “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Distinction” that there are cases where we can easily and clearly distinguish between facts and values — the objective and the subjective. However, it is wrong to think that we can ALWAYS do so. There are many sentences, especially in economic theories, where the two are “inextricably entangled” . This is the fourth post in a sequence about Re-Reading Keynes. This post is focused on a...

Total Black Friday sales down vs last year:http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-holidayshopping-idUSKBN13L0ZH?il=0 The Trump thing looks to be going to go from bad to worse. I understand that sometimes it makes sense to vote in the village idiot. But then you do have to deal with him being the President. It’s like having an 8 year old loud mouthed spoiled brat boy king without a regent. So my advice is to not get your hopes up too high for anything rational coming out of the...

http://econintersectllc.cmail2.com/t/r-l-yhuudyld-jutdvkyuh-jy/ http://econintersect.com/pages/releases/release.php?post=201611250637&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Global%20Economic%20Intersection%20Newsletter%20Feed&utm_content=Daily%20Global%20Economic%20Intersection%20Newsletter%20Feed+CID_2c6311bc7e868470eee44c0357c5f143&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=Trucking%20Data%20Mixed%20In%20October%202016 Not looking good: ...