Tag Archives: US EConomics

New jobless claims continue to decline at rate of 100,000 per month, while continued claims stall at elevated level New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic datapoint, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic – both new infections and deaths are near their lowest points in a year.  We have hit my objective for new claims to be under 500,000 by...

Larry Summers Doubles Down On His Inflation Prediction  But somehow becomes vaguer about exactly how this is going to happen and show up, but he wants the Fed to stop it in its track, goshdarnit.  This is in a column appearing in the Washington Post, May 25, “The inflation risk is real.” Well, he does start out by saying that the economic recovery from the pandemic is a good thing, as is of course the the receeding of the pandemic itself, with...

Commenter and blogger RJS at Market Watch 666 Just two widely watched reports were released this week: the April report on New Residential Construction from the Census Bureau and the Existing Home Sales Report for April from the National Association of Realtors…in addition to those, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary for April this week, which breaks down the two employment surveys...

Existing vs. new home sales: sales have peaked, expect prices to soon peak I normally don’t pay much attention to existing home sales. Even though they constitute about 90% of the housing market, they have much less impact on the economy overall than new home sales (because all of the economic activity involved in building the house, and then landscaping the outside and furnishing the inside). But they can be a comparison with new home...

Adam Smith’s been dead for more than 230 years now; Karl Marx for 138. The industrial age began around 1760; ended around 1960. Around 1950, we entered the information & technology age, an age every bit as epochal as the industrial age. Missing to date in this new age is the Adam Smith equivalent to rationalize it; the Karl Marx equivalent to analyze it. Hopefully, one or more of their big minded equivalents will appear forthwith. Will the...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 17 – 21 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The theme of a supply-constrained economic Boom continues, with the addition this past week of the national average of gas prices going over $3 a gallon for the first time since 2014, probably in part to the Colonial Pipeline snafu. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you right up to date on the state of...

Big decline in new jobless claims continues, while decline in continuing claims has stalled New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic datapoint, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic – both new infections and deaths are near their lowest points in a year.  We have hit my objective for new claims to be under 500,000 by Memorial Day. My second...

Further considerations on the disappointing April jobs report. Consider the averages! I’ve been threatening for a couple of weeks to run some extended comments on the big miss in the April jobs report. As there’s no economic news of note today, here goes . . . . 1. It’s possible March was the outlier rather than April. The original report for March was that 916,000 jobs were added. In this month’s report it was revised down to 770,000....

‘Cut the Bullsh*t‘ and Tax Rich People Like Us, Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil Monday is Tax Day in the United States this year and the Patriotic Millionaires—rich Americans who advocate for greater redistribution of wealth and power to working people in the U.S.—are using the occasion to launch “an offensive” against the “selfish billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, and CEOs” who are trying to undermine progressive tax reforms that would require the...

April housing permits and starts: a pullback from peak, but no recessionary signal UPDATED The monthly statistics on housing permits and starts, reported this morning, were mixed, as permits increased slightly and starts declined: The less volatile single-family permits also declined slightly. On the one hand, a high level of construction activity is continuing. But the three-month moving average of both single-family and total...