Tag Archives: US EConomics

Wikipedia offers an excellent synopsis of Regulatory Capture. In her book, Media Capture, Anya Schiffrin does so for Media Capture. In 1971, soon-to-be Associate Justice Lewis Powell Jr., then a corporate lawyer, wrote a memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled Attack On American Free Enterprise System. To his mind, the status quo, which he called The American Free...

Aggregate hours and payrolls of nonsupervisory workers and the onset of recessions An important reason I focus on whether or not the economy is heading into recession is that during recessions income and jobs both decline for the middle and working classes as a whole. In that regard, Jared Bernstein, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors, posted two graphs over the weekend contra the panic about a potential negative Q2 GDP reading. ...

What is Happiness?  Post your entries in the comments. Sandwichman WILL JUDGE THEM. Tags: happiness

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Weekly Indicators for July 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The 10-2 year Treasury yield inverted again, with very little fanfare. And several other leading indicators deteriorated a little further as well. But as the jobs report showed, the nowcast is still positive. As usual, clicking over […] The post Weekly Indicators for July 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha appeared first on Angry Bear.

(Dan here…lifted from comments) Barkley Rosser writes: There are two things Trump did that added to inflation that Biden has somehow not undone yet. One of them is reversing the Trump tariffs, which he clearly fears doing because of opposition by Organized Labor and many white working-class voters in the crucial Rust Belt states. Some of them even support tariffs that hurt them personally, such as the autoworkers who lost their jobs at the...

June jobs report: strong headline numbers, betraying numerous signs of rougher times Consumption leads employment. That’s true at bottoms, and it’s true at peaks as well. Since February, when consumption growth started to flag, I have been waiting for it to show up decisively in jobs numbers. In March through May, average growth decelerated from over 500,000/month to 400,000/month. So in this jobs report, I have been most interested to see if...

White Rabbit  I have finished reading to my two younger grandsons the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. I read the edition with commentary by the late mathematician, Martin Gardner, who used to write for Scientific American. I also just listened to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” which is pretty bloody sharp, but which draws on both of the Alice books. While most attention is on the first one, “Wonderland,” which got made into a not bad...

Jobless claims continue to drift higher, are no longer a positive; but no recession signaled Initial jobless claims rose 4,000 to 235,000 last week, vs. the 50+ year low of 166,000 set in March. The 4 week average also rose by 750 to 232,500, compared with the all-time low of 170,500 three months ago.  Continuing claims rose 51,000 to 1,375,000, which is 69,000 above their 50 year low set on May 6: Initial claims have now been in an uptrend for...

May JOLTS report: a significant deceleration in the underlying jobs market has likely begun Late last year I introduced the idea that the jobs market was similar to a game of musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves among the chairs.  Because of the pandemic, several million fewer players have been trying to sit in those chairs, leaving many empty. Additionally, there has been...

It began the day of the leaking of the draft, maybe even in anticipation thereof. Legal scholars, bright law students, and informed journalists began the shredding process. In the days since and for far into the future they have and will point out the many fallacies in logic; the disregard for unintended consequences; the disregard for reality, personal rights, females, and human life; the intent of the founders; the need for the Constitution to...