Tag Archives: US EConomics

“Because, that is just the way it is,” we are told. The ‘way it is’, for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it is how it should be. Or, we hear, “Because, that is the way it has always been.” It’s too late to change the ‘always has been’ part, but just because we have always done something a certain way doesn’t mean that is how it should be done. The proper response to both of the two axioms is, “How should it be?” A third reason/axiom often proffered...

Real retail sales in March continue to show a weaker consumer sector, forecast weaker jobs reports For the past few months, I have suspected that a sharp deceleration beginning with the consumer sector of the economy was more likely than not. The retail sales report for March was consistent with that suspicion. Nominally retail sales rose +0.5% in March, but since consumer prices rose 1.2%, real retail sales declined -0.7%. Further, they are...

Jobless claims: the employment sector of the economy continues to do just fine [Note: I’ll comment on this morning’s retail sales report for March separately] Initial jobless claims rose 18,000 to 185,000 from their 50+ year last week. The 4 week average rose 2,000 from last week’s all-time low to 172,250. Continuing claims declined -48,000 this week to 1,475,000, a new 50 year low (but still higher than the 1960s): Essentially...

Some History 2014: A frenzy of hospital mergers into ACOs as detailed by Philip Longman and Paul Hewitt could leave many families having lesser amounts of healthcare paid for by healthcare insurance due to healthcare industry consolidation leading to higher prices. We have seen this happen with higher prices for insurance plans, increased deductibles, and less covered. I think we have all experienced this in the last couple of years,...

March consumer inflation part 2: I told you so; the Fed *must* start paying attention to house price indexes This is the second part of my take on the March consumer inflation report. As you may have already read, total inflation clocked in at +1.2% for March alone! YoY consumer prices are up 8.6%, the highest 12-month rate since 1981. As anticipated, gas prices were a huge contributor; less energy, prices were up 0.4%; less both food and...

Tough Guy, senator Mitch McConnell making political hay over President Joe Biden extending a student loan moratorium for a few more months. The mistake Joe is making or has made is not deciding what to do. It is getting late in the game of politics. Here is senator Mitch McConnell. “I think in this country, it’s important to remind people that we ought to pay our debts,” McConnell opined. “We all pay our debts. And with regard to extending the...

March consumer inflation part 1: real wages decline sharply The March consumer inflation report was particularly important, and particularly bad. So much so that I am going to divide my comments into two separate posts. First, the news on real wages was terrible. While nominally nonsupervisory wages rose 0.4% in March, since inflation rose 1.2%, “real” wages declined -0.8% in March alone. On a YoY basis, real wages were down -1.8%:...

Housing affordability update: prices vs. mortgage payments; and ramifications for the economy No economic news today (Monday 4/11), and most States didn’t report new COVID cases over the weekend, so let’s take a look at something else; namely, housing affordability, which I’ve been meaning to update for several weeks. The first graph below compares 4 measures of house prices: the FHFA purchase index, the Case Shiller national index, and the...

Asymmetric Whining  This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better.  The latest example of that involves gasoline prices.  They were rising and got into the range of near-real highs seen in times like 2008, 1981, and 1918.  But now they have slid backward, down in the neighborhood of 20 cents per gallon where I am.  Crude prices are down as...

In the Paul Krugman vs. Nate Silver cage match, I’m on Team Nate Prof. Paul Krugman and Nate Silver got into a dust-up earlier this week about why so many voters seem to have soured on the Democrats. So that you don’t have to go digging through all the Twitter detritus, Alternet has a good write-up copying all the relevant tweets. (Apparently, the two have been at odds at least since 2014, when Five Thirty-Eight left The NY Times and went to ESPN;...