Tag Archives: US EConomics

How “FHFA-CPI” using house prices rather than OER shows a sharp deceleration in inflation  – by New Deal democrat Paul Krugman made another foray into the “inflation is mostly gone” genre over the weekend with a thread on Mastodon that largely relied on the following graph: concluding that “[A]t this point the burden of proof lies on anyone claiming that we had more than a, well, transitory inflation spike that’s mostly behind us.” I’m...

Weekly Indicators for January 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat I forgot to post this yesterday, so here you go today . . .  My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Every now and then you get a contratrend week, when a bunch of metrics move in the opposite direction as the overall recent trend. This past week was just such a week, primarily among financial indicators. As usual, clicking over and reading will...

From the NYT opinion pages comes Paul Krugman’s description of the two basic problems of a declining population in a country, Dr. Krugman ues China as an example. China’s population declined last year, for the first time since the mass deaths associated with Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1960s. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that China has announced that its population declined. Many observers are skeptical about...

Existing home sales and prices decline; plus, a closer look at multi-unit housing construction  – by New Deal democrat I will keep my comments on December existing home sales and prices brief. That’s because, even though they make up about 90% of the total market, they have much less economic impact than new home construction. They are best used to confirm trends; in this case, that housing sales have continued to decline, and prices (which...

I can not say I have been exposed to any of this switcheroo as my meds are older technology. We are also on regular Medicare and not Medicare Advantage. I have a larger say with the former. Part D works mostly except the pharmacies in my area are less helpful than they were in Michigan. And these drugs do seem to work to my needs for now. Doctor Pelzman does have a major point. The insurance companies, PBMs, distributors (McKesson, etc.) have...

The actual Big News in this morning’s housing report was – positive  – by New Deal democrat For the second month in a row, the biggest news in the housing report was not in the headlines.  Most of what you are going to read is about how bad housing permits and starts were, and that they are recessionary. And it’s true. In particular, the most leading and least noisy housing metric of all is single family permits, and they declined another...

Jobless claims continue their string of good news  – by New Deal democrat If yesterday’s economic data was bad, this morning’s was considerably better (I’ll post on housing construction later). Initial jobless claims declined 15,000 to 195,000, tied for their best number in almost 8 months. The 4 week moving average declined 6,500 to 206,000, the best number in over 6 months. Continuing claims, one week earlier, did increase by 17,000 to...

And the King of Coincident Indicators rolls over  – by New Deal democrat This morning’s second big – and big negative – report was for industrial production, the King of Coincident Indicators (I call it so because historically, it more often than not marks the exact month +/-1 that a recession begins or ends). In December industrial production declined -0.7%, and manufacturing production declined -1.3%. Even worse, both were revised down by...

December real retail sales: the worst in almost two years  – by New Deal democrat Real retail sales, one of my favorite indicators, was updated this morning for December, and it was significant. It’s not just that retail sales declined -1.1% for the month both in nominal and real terms; it’s that both October and November were revised downward by -0.2% and -0.4% respectively, so the ultimate number is considerably worse than would otherwise...

“Job Market’s 2.6 Million Missing People Unnerves Star Harvard Economist,” (msn.com), Ben Steverman  Originally in a comment in this post Discussion on Solutions to Social Security, Angry Bear. The number I had originally calculated was ~2.6 million people joining the Civilian Labor Force. I had said: Since you addressed me, what group is dropping out of the Civilian Labor Force? “To get back to what the Participation Rate was in 2020, 2.0...