Tag Archives: US EConomics

Will the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Reduce Inflation?, Econospeak  Probably not, but it also will probably not increase it either. This is the judgment of the Congressional Budget Office and also the Penn Wharton Budget Model, as well as libertarian economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason, who is critical of much of its content.  It has inflationary and disinflationary elements, and it looks that they about balance out, although in the longer run...

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk (8/23/2022 02:21:00 PM) had this report on mileage driven for June 2022. I am sure as Bill suggests gasoline prices may have played a role in the decrease. I wonder too if Covid kept people from travelling too? One of the links to the DOT page also shows travel by segments of the country. The West showing a far greater (5X) decrease than the Northeast. Calculated Risk: DOT: “Vehicle Miles Driven Decreased...

July personal income and spending: more modestly good fallout from lower gas prices There was more good fallout from the recent decline in gas prices in today’s July report on personal income and spending. Personal income rose 0.2% for the month nominally, and nominal spending rose 0.1%. But because the relevant measure of inflation, the PCE deflator, declined -0.1%, real income rose 0.3% and real personal spending rose 0.2%. Meanwhile June’s...

Something interesting is happening in Texas. Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller’s office has made a hard push on a marketing campaign for a renewed push for the Farm Fresh Network. Including a new website design. To catch you all up, the Farm Fresh Network was an initiative created by the Ag Commissioners office in 2015 that created an online network of local farms; a database of where, who, and what is being grown there, for the farmers as...

Jobless claims: put the recession on hold! (For now) For the last several months, there had been nearly a relentless slow increase in new jobless claims. That trend has broken, at least for now. Initial jobless claims declined by 2,000 to 243,000. The 4 week average, however, increased by 1,500 to 247,000.  Continuing claims declined -19,000 from their 4 month high water mark one week ago to 1,415,000: Claims had been trending almost...

All the delays in getting to this point. I certainly was not fooled. Biden has an extensive history of believing students will renege on their loans, when there was no evidence to support his contention early-on. By early, let go back to 1978 (link is provided). I have added other Angry Bear links to build a foundation for my words. Amateur Socialist brought up a point at Naked Capitalism, which makes sense: Reading through the comments I’m...

Agricultural news is slim, few and far between and usually relegated to only a few places. Mainstream media doesn’t have an audience for hard ag journalism, and ag journalism mostly preaches to the choir. Two great publications that I typically get information from are Successful Farming and AgWeb –. Both have varying degrees of in-depth coverage and decent reporting. I also subscribe to Successful Farming magazine. Usually, I can find topics...

July new home sales signal a recession is near  Let’s start with reminders about new home sales data: 1. It is very noisy 2. It is heavily revised. But 3. It usually leads at peaks and troughs. With that in mind, unless today’s new home sales data for July is revised away, it is very significant. First of all, June’s sales data was indeed revised slightly lower from 590,000 to 585,000. More significantly, the median price of a...

Kind of a mixed bag on articles this week. Quite a few articles on what I would call general interest, kind of interesting stories. An abused elephant tears his owner into two pieces. An article about a pod of penguins(?) save a swimmer from a shark? It is worth a read just to find out the author meant dolphins (which is in the text). Sad Good Byes Judith Durham obituary | Pop and rock | The Guardian, Garth Cartwright, As you age, you begin to...

The state of inflation There’s no big economic news today (Aug. 22), and as usual very limited COVID reporting over the weekend, so let’s catch up on the state of inflation in the economy. Three of the biggest components of inflation have been gas, housing, and vehicles. Let’s look at each in that order. According to GasBuddy, average US prices as of today are $3.86/gallon: As the above graph shows, that means that almost 80% of the...