Tag Archives: US EConomics

Kind of a mixed bag of what news was showing up in My In-Box. It was evenly spread amongst various topics. Ford building a battery plant just like everyone else is planning. Wall Street buying up residential homes. That purchasing of houses will come to no-good for the average citizen. ACA Preventive is under threat by a looney federal judge in Texas and SCOTUS has to decide. Non-Opioid pain treatment sounds like a good idea. If you do not like the...

House price indexes: more evidence of a summer peak  – by New Deal democrat The Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes were updated through July (technically, the average of May through July) this morning. Ordinarily I do not pay them too much mind, but this year they are very important in confirming a peak in house prices. Although the FHFA index is seasonally adjusted, the Case Shiller index is not, so the best way to show them in...

I’m not a macro person, I can’t even play one on TV.  That said, from 20,000 feet, with my admittedly blurry glasses on, I really don’t understand why the Fed and other central banks are pushing so hard on the brakes.  What follows are questions, skeptical about rate hikes, but genuinely questions. What exactly would have happened if the Fed had raised rates more moderately, or even not at all?  Would inflation have spiraled out of control?  It’s...

This is a good one from Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson. It is along the lines of what I would consult in at various companies till I fixed it and was no longer needed. It is an update on what has happened in the United States. Something which has not occurred since pre-Reagan. The nations labor is being “valued” again. Peter Drucker: “Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are...

Gas and oil price update: good news and bad news We’ll get some important house price information tomorrow, but there is no economic news of significance today, so let’s update gas and oil prices. As indicated in the title, there’s good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news first. According to GasBuddy, gas prices have not declined in over a week: They have bounced off $3.64/gallon and stabilized at $3.66-7/gallon. Which still...

Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute take a closer quantitative look at the sources of inflation the last two years: This research brief is the first to explore the size and distribution of markups (essentially the difference between sales and marginal costs) and profit margins across 3,698 firms operating in the US in 2021, reproducing and updating the analysis of Jan De Loecker, Jan Eeckhout, and Gabriel Unger’s The Rise of...

Weekly Indicators for September 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators column is up at Seeking Alpha. For the third week in a row, interest rates increased, and gas prices, along with the prices of other commodities, tumbled. While the decline in gas prices is good, the downturn in other commodity prices is a sign of weakening global demand. Once the decline in gas prices stops, I suspect the economic...

It is refreshing to see Dean Baker using one of the words I use to describe what the FED does when they are hiking Interest Rates. Those FED actions do not create results over night. Because they can’t, read on. Powell appears to be frustrated by the lack of economic slowing. Maybe there are other issues behind the slow reaction such as supply chains, fiscal stimulus early on, healthcare subsidies, etc. The latter two were vital otherwise we...

Focusing on the short end of the yield curve  – by New Deal democrat  When most analysts talk about yield curve inversions, they typically mean a measure of the 10 year bond vs. a shorter maturity like 3 month or 2 years. These certainly have merit – in fact the 10 year minus 2 year inversion has typically had the longest lead time before recessions. But the NY Fed has written that special attention should be paid to the short end of the...

Jobless claims: the positive trend continues  – by New Deal democrat For yet another week, initial jobless claims continued their reversal from had been in an almost relentless uptrend from spring through early August. This week initial claims rose -5,000 to 213,000 from a revised 3 month low of 208,000, while the 4 week average declined another -6,000 to a new 3 month low of 216,750. Continuing claims, which lag somewhat, declined 22,000 to...