Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

The Bahrain-Israel Mutual Recognition  This freshly announced mutual recognition follows the one between the UAE and Israel, which set a new pattern, with Bahrain and possibly others (Oman?) predicted to follow.  I am not surprised it was Bahrain that was next, although it may prove to be the only one.  There are several reasons why it was most likely to be next, and why we might not see Oman join in, although that cannot be ruled out. I see three...

Consumer inflation continues to accelerate YoY, but so far no big problem The consumer price index for August was reported up +0.4% this morning. This is the third straight big increase. Below I show this plus the more stable consumer prices minus gas (red): Here’s what the monthly changes look like over the past 10 years: As you can see, these are at the upper end of monthly inflation increases for the past 10 years. On a YoY basis, however,...

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 […]