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from Peter Radford Shocking is an understatement. Donald Trump is unfit for public office, be it town clerk or president of the US. He’s an unbalanced egomaniac. He’s a racist. He’s an immature misogynist. He’s many other awful things. Presidential, he is not. How did we get here? Failure. But a particular kind of failure. Failure dressed as success. A success so sweeping and deep that we hardly recognize the extent of the change that it wrought. Naturally I am speaking of the victory of...

from David Ruccio We’re all familiar with the usual indictment of the U.S. healthcare system: we pay much more and we get much less. For example, according to the Commonwealth Fund: Data from the OECD show that the U.S. spent 17.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2013. This was almost 50 percent more than the next-highest spender (France, 11.6% of GDP) and almost double what was spent in the U.K. (8.8%). Since 2009, health care spending growth has...

unadjusted sales rate of growth decelerated 0.9 % month-over-month. unadjusted sales year-over-year growth is down 0.6 % year-over-year unadjusted sales (but inflation adjusted) down 1.2 % year-over-year the 3 month rolling average of unadjusted sales decelerated 0.4 % month-over-month, and down 1,9 % year-over-year. Very modest household credit expansion coincided with very weak growth for the last several quarters: From the NY Fed: Household Debt Balances Increase...

No sign of increased global demand here: China Exports Slide on Weak Demand By Mark Magnier Aug 9 (WSJ) — China’s General Administration of Customs said Monday that exports fell 4.4% in July year-over-year in dollar terms after a 4.8% decline in June. July imports fell by a greater-than-expected 12.5% from a year earlier, raising concerns over weak domestic demand. This compared with an 8.4% fall in June, the customs agency said. China’s trade surplus widened more than...

from Robert Locke In the Collapse of the American Management Mystique, Oxford UP 1996, I wrote about the rapid decline in American staple industries,  “in automobiles and in the related industries of steel, glass, and tires.  The total number of workers in the automobile industry declined from 802,800 in December 1978 to 478,000 in January 1983.  By 1980 Japan had become the world’s major automobile producing nation.  As Japanese replaced American, American automakers world market share...

By Thornton “Tip” Parker As NEP readers know, the economy consists of  private, government, and foreign sectors.  Financial flows among the sectors always add up to zero; that is, one sector’s deficits must be offset by surpluses in either or both of the others. If the private sector imports more than it exports, ignoring investment flows, it will run a financial deficit while the foreign sector runs a surplus and the economy will then slow down as money in the private sector becomes...

from David Ruccio According to a new study, The Geography of the Global Super-Rich, by Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Isabel Ritchie, the United States is home to the world’s largest number of billionaires, with 541, 30 percent of the total. China is second with 223 or 12 percent. Next in line are India and Russia, with 82 billionaires (4.5 percent) each. Germany is fifth with 78 billionaires (4.3 percent). The United Kingdom is sixth with 71 (3.9 percent). Switzerland has 58...

Government hiring contributed 38,000 jobs last month and a total of almost 100,000 over the last three months: This is the jobs number before seasonal adjustments: The year over year number ‘takes out’ the seasonal factors: Note how many of the new employees were previously considered to be ‘outside the labor force’ for purposes of calculating the unemployment number: The duration of unemployment has come down but it’s still higher than it’s ever been before this cycle: So,...

Larger trade deficit than expected for June, lowering Q2 GDP calculations as previously discussed: Much better than expected and prior month total payrolls were revised up some with private payrolls revised down. The headline unemployment rate was unchanged, while U6 unemployment, the broader measure, moved up a tenth to 9.7, indicating an unexpectedly large increase in the available labor force. More details later today. Also, year over year job growth is still...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economists, such as Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, celebrate international trade (including outsourcing, which they argue is just another form of international trade) at every opportunity. But right now, voters—especially in the United States and the United Kingdom—aren’t buying what mainstream economists are selling. They are (as I’ve argued here, here, and here) ignoring the so-called experts. That rejection clearly disturbs Mankiw, who just adds fuel to the fire...