Tag Archives: US EConomics

As you “should” know by now, Alan Collinge is an activist and has organized the Student Loan Justice Org a number of years ago. The Organization attempts to represent those student loan borrowers who have no recourse for forgiveness or bankruptcy as every other person in the nation has when taking out a loan? Alan and his thousands of followers having gathered well over 1 million signatures on a petition seeking relief from these loans. The...

A lot has been said about building semiconductor manufacturing plants in the US. One plant grows the silicon wafers and the other plant fabricates (fabs) the semiconductors. The manufacture of semiconductors is not labor intensive. Growing wafers is boring business as one engineer told me a decade back. The US did manufacture much of its need domestically at one time (see graph at the left). However, U.S. policymakers held tight to the belief...

The long leading outlook through mid year 2023 at Seeking Alpha I posted the long leading outlook this last week at Seeking Alpha, and seeing as there is no big economic news today, this might be a good day to bring you up to speed. My long leading outlook for 12 months from now can be found by clicking here. These indicators have been sufficiently negative that I am actually looking to see when they begin to forecast a positive outlook...

JAMA Network “How Do Commercial Insurance Plans Fare Under Proposed Prescription Drug Price Regulation?” Rena M. Conti, Richard G. Frank, Len M. Nichols December 2021, this article came out detailing Medicare negotiating directly with pharmaceutical companies and the impact of the negotiation on people insured by commercial plans. That is if commercial insurance plans were included in the price reductions given to Medicare. We are going to see how...

Jobless claims: once again, a relentless uptrend I feel like a broken record at this point, as every week the trend seems more and more relentless. Initial jobless claims rose once again, by 14,000 (seriously revised down by 12,000 from last week’s reading of 260,000) to 262,000. More importantly, the 4 week average rose another 4,500 as well to 252,000, a (revised) 8 month high.  Continuing claims also rose 8,000 to 1,428,000, the highest...

The world economy is undergoing extreme changes that have been both generational as well as exacerbated by lack of investment, global pandemic and supply chain crunch. Logistical nightmare aside, the generational shift from the prosperity of the Baby Boomer generation in the West as well as the great readjustment in China post Mao and the post-Soviet boom of Russian Millennials have been long coming, but underforecast or appreciated. Turn of the...

Just some ramblings of mine after looking at numbers . . . . Immigration, Population Replacement, Politics, and the Economy are what comes together to ensure national growth. I am going to talk each in no particular order to answer my own questions that come up from time to time. Voting patterns continue to change. I started to track three states only because of 2016. I was nosey to see if they were radical in changes. They are not and the...

July consumer inflation: a tale of two disparate trends  – by New Deal democrat Consumer prices were unchanged in July, as two very disparate trends canceled out one another. YoY prices increased 8.5%, below June’s multi-decade record of 9.0%: The two disparate trends are shown in the below bar graph of monthly changes since the end of last year. On the one hand, energy prices (red) declined -4.6% in July; but owner’s equivalent rent (gold)...

Coronavirus dashboard for August 9: BA.5 dominant, with a slow waning; a model for endemicity  – by New Deal democrat  BIobot’s most recent update, through last week, shows a decline of 15% of COVID in wastewater, consistent with about 460,000 “real” new infections per day: All 4 Census regions (not shown) are participating in the decline. Confirmed cases (dotted line below) have declined by a roughly similar percent, to 105,500....

Weekly Indicators for August 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Several important metrics have reversed course in the past month. Interest rates, especially mortgage rates, have declined (in the case of mortgages, by 1 full % from their peak. As many have pointed out, gas prices have fallen by about $1/gallon from their peak as well. That is putting more money into consumers’...