Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Improvement in initial and continuing claims stalls out This morning’s jobless claims report shows that the trend of “less worse” news has at least temporarily ended, at a level of about 150,000 higher than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose for the second week in a row, by 20,140 to 857,148. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Steve Rattner on the Economy

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for August 31 – September 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Another long leading indicator, corporate profits, are expected to improve substantially in Q3, meaning that yet another forecasting element for the economy one year from now has stopped being a negative. Lots of conditions are in place for growth – but only when the coronavirus is brought under control. As usual,...

The Revolutionary Post Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a letter. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people under one flag, and in doing so, she believes the post office actually created the United States of America. Digital Sight Management, and the Mystery of the Missing Amazon Receipts  Amazon stopped including...

August jobs report: continued slow incremental progress HEADLINES: 1,371,000 million jobs gained. The gains since May total about 48% of the 22.1 million job losses in March and April. The alternate and more volatile measure in the household report was 3,756,000 jobs gained, which factors into the unemployment and underemployment rates below. U3 unemployment rate fell -1.8% from 10.2% to 8.4%, compared with the January low of 3.5%. U6 underemployment...

Initial and continuing claims: very slow “less worse” progress continues The continued good news in this Thursday morning’s jobless claims report is that the trend of “less worse” news is intact. But the improvement has slowed dramatically and is still at a level of about 150,000 higher than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose (slightly) by 7,591 from their pandemic low last week to...

Should We Fear A Reappearance Of Inflation?  In today’s Washington Post Robert J. Samuelson has raised the possibility that the Federal Reserve may be setting the US up for a reappearance of inflation.  He invoked the 1960s and 1970s when supposedly the Fed allowed inflation to get out of control out of a supposedly misguided effort to bring down unemployment by allowing successive small increases in inflation. Supposedly the newly released report on...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance.” — Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” The photograph used in Andy Warhol’s 1964 print, “Race Riot” was taken by Charles Moore and was published in LIFE magazine in May of 1963. Warhol used it without permission […]

[unable to retrieve full-text content]by New Deal democrat The long leading forecast for H1 2021 at Seeking Alpha It’s been a long time since I “officially” updated my primary set of long leading indicators, mainly because until it is brought under control the coronavirus pandemic renders other indicators moot. But that is likely to change by sometime in spring […]

An Increasing Anomaly In The US Balance Of Payments  On Econbrowser Menzie Chinn has posted about an increase in the scale of US international net indebtedenss. Since the late 1980s the US has been a net debtor internationally, borrowing more from abroad then we are lending and investing there.  The increase in this net indebtedness has noticeably accelerated since our current POTUS took office, and especially this year.  The size of that net...