Tag Archives: US EConomics

July jobs report: more like this, please While the NBER has declared that the recession ended in April 2020, and income, sales, and GDP have all fully recovered, two of the series that the NBER uses have yet to have made a full recovery: Industrial production, still down -1.2% compared with February 2020, and employment, still down -4.4% as of the jobs report last month. So the main questions for this month’s jobs report for July are how much...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for August 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Although the Delta wave is raging, nothing is impacting behavior. Neither producers nor consumers appear to have altered their behavior in any significant way at all because of the Delta. As usual, clicking through and reading will bring you right up to date on the economy, and bring me a little pocket change...

There is another world and economy out there which we do not see or hear much from other than when we talk politics and then we wonder why views may be different than ours. Michael Smith has been adding an agricultural dimension to the Bear which I think we need to understand. Years back, I did a post which I caught some grief on because some thought I was in support of certain beliefs. In reality, there was a larger picture to what I wrote back...

Initial jobless claims continue in range, while continuing claims sharply decline Initial jobless claims declined another 14,000 this week to 385,000, still 17,000 above their best pandemic levels of 368,000 set on June 26 and July 10. The 4 week average of claims declined by 250 to 394,000, also 9,500 above its pandemic low set on July 11: Significant progress in the decline of initial claims remains stalled, as it has for the last 2...

The American Rescue Plan included a fully refundable child tax credit.  The credit provides $3,600 per year for children under 6, and $3,000 per year for children between 6 and 17. The credit is paid out monthly, and slowly phases out for single parents who earn more than $112,500 and married couples earning more than $150,000. This legislation marks a sea change in government policy towards poor children.  For years, the poorest children have...

Coberly: “We need more jobs with longer hours and cheaper plastic toys to distract ourselves from our empty lives.” being facetious . . . . Or Do we? EMichael: American Average Work Hours: At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per...

Q2 2021 GDP: goodbye recession, hasta la vista recovery, hello expansion Nominal GDP before inflation increased 3.1%, while real GDP for the 2nd Quarter increased 1.6%. The real annual rate of growth was thus 6.5%. Real GDP is now 0.8% higher than its last quarter before the onset of the pandemic: The recession is over, as was declared by the NBER last week. In fact, so is the recovery, if one measures by GDP, since once all of the...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith talks crop prices, Will History Repeat Itself?, AG WEB Farm Journal, Jerry Gulke High crop prices, like much what is going on in the greater economy might be transitory. The author keeps up the tone that high prices in the silage department usually only last a few months. We are seeing this with lumber. We should see this in corn as well. I would venture to even go out on a limb and posit that climate change...

Dan sent this article to me and I scan-read it as it is done in generalities. This not a criticism of the content as much as my pointing out it is done in brevity. The push is big for some form of Single Payer healthcare if one were to call it “insurance.” At some point and with the implementation of Single Payer healthcare, insurance could conceivably disappear. Medicare for All Rallies in 50 Cities Show Big Support for Universal Health Care,...

Housing sales decline, while price surges continue So I take a little one-day road trip on my vacation and come back to find much weeping and gnashing of teeth and generalized whining about a big decline in new home sales. Well, what exactly were they expecting? The new home sales data is particularly volatile and heavily revised. So, in June, it was volatile, and May was revised substantially downward (blue in the graph below). Prices also...