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Rail Week Ending 04 June 2016: Rail Contraction Accelerates By Steven HansenJune 10 (Econintersect) — Week 22 of 2016 shows same week total rail traffic (from same week one year ago) contracted according to the Association of American Railroads (AAR) traffic data. The improvement seen last week evaporated, and was likely due to the a holiday falling into different weeks between years. And this indicator: Cost cutting likewise reduces income:

from David Ruccio Every economic theory includes—or, at least, is haunted by—the distinction between productive and unproductive labor. The distinction serves as the basis of all their major claims, from the most basic theory of value to the conception of who deserves what within capitalism. The distinction began with the French Physiocrats, especially François Quesnay, who in his 1758 Tableau Économique made a distinction between the “Productive” Class (which consisted of agricultural...

In an interesting and highly readable recent Bloomberg blogpost Noah Smith distinguishes 4 kinds of macro: coffee-house macro, financial macro, academic macro and Fed macro. I like to add ’empirical macro’, i.e. the National Accounts, but that’s for another occasion as I just ran into a blogpost by Olivier Blanchard and a speech by Mario Draghi which nicely illustrate the differences between two of Noah’s macro’s, i.e. academic macro and what I want to rename ‘central bank’ macro (sorry,...

The deceleration in jobs openings released yesterday leads the deceleration in employment. Downward job revisions also mean lower income estimates, so watch for personal income and savings to be revised down as well. And it all started decelerating after oil capex collapsed at the end of 2014. Job Openings Hit Record High, But Hiring Fades In JOLTS Survey By Ed CarsonJune 8 (IBD) — Job openings matched a record high in April but hiring activity sank to the lowest since last...

The poll “What are the top 10 economics books of the last 100 years?” was open for two weeks and over 3,000 economists voted.  They could vote for up to 10 of the books on the short list of 50 which had been compiled from the nominations submitted by Real-World Economics Review readers.  People on average voted for five books.  Here are the results. Top 10 economics books of the last 100 years 1. (1,597 votes) John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)...

From the MBA: The Refinance Index increased 7 percent from the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 12 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 12 percent compared with the previous week and was 6 percent lower than the same week one year ago. HighlightsPurchase applications for home mortgages rose strongly in the June 3 week and were up 12 percent from the prior week when seasonally adjusted to account for the...

Lower than expected as last month’s higher print reverses. Remember all the hoopla over last month’s number? And how the consumer was finally spending? I suspect you’ll hear nothing about how that’s not the case after all, and note how the chart shows it’s been decelerating since the collapse of oil capex: Consumer Credit Released On 6/7/2016 3:00:00 PM For Apr, 2016 HighlightsApril was a strong month for retail sales but it wasn’t an especially strong one for consumer...

You may vote for ten books.  The 50 nominated books are listed in alphabetical order by author on your ballot below. Take Our Poll

I fluffed my lines on a recent BBC Newsnight  segment on Uber.  As the discussion was wrapping up, I warned that the uberisation of the economy – the ambition to corral the entire cash flow of whole sectors of the global economy into the pockets of a few – is utopian. I said all this in response to Ms Julie Meyer’s assertion that, and I quote (11.23 minutes into the show): The world is being driven by networks…and they’re platforms…That’s the future, we can’t stop that from happening....