Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Abbreviated coronavirus dashboard for April 18 Here is the update through yesterday (April 17) There are some extended comments I want to make about the pandemic, and some graphs comparing States, etc., that are best done separately, so this will be an abbreviated update. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +35,354 to 706,779 (vs. 35,219 prior peak on April...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The final dominoes among the coincident indicators fell this past week. In the “real economy,” the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is fully priced in. In the stock market . . . I’m scratching my head. As usual, clicking over and reading should not only be informative for you, but tosses me a penny or two for my efforts in bringing...

What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic indicators and the polls” The model takes two steps. First, average the head-to-head heats by the two major...

Corporate Bond Spreads and the Pandemic The St. Louis FED has an economics blog: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in economic activity across the globe. Financial markets, in particular, have experienced surges in volatility that had not been seen since the 2007-09 financial crisis … The figure below plots the median value for our measure of credit spreads (the difference between a corporate bond’s yield and a benchmark...

Trump Defunds WHO and USPS: Will Motherhood and Apple Pie Be Next? Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Health Organization (WHO).  It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the coronavirus and the WHO for supposedly supporting China in their supposedly nefarious conduct, alloeing hin to wallow in  fit of xenophobia as well as accusations...

I am going to attempt a briefer clearer version of this post I am interested in critiquing (and mostly praising) the CARES Act and discussing what still needs to be done. I think my points (if any) are that an extraordinary unforseen crisis simplifies some issues and relaxes some constraints. I will now go by topic 1. Aid to the unemployed. There are sudddenly many more people without market income. They need help. Here I applaud the decision to give...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly. There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income...

Trump All Over The Place On Oil Prices Indeed, are we surprised? But POTUS has reached a new level of hypocrisy on all this. So a while ago when oil prices began falling sharply, Trump bragged about how much this was going to help consumers, and he should get credit for it, of course. More recently, since WTI crude and even Brent fell below $30 per barrel (with WTI just over 20 right now, and Brent just over 30), he became worried about his pals in the...

Consumer prices sharply decline in March: keep your eye on wages This morning we got some monthly economic data that will be actually valuable to watch throughout this Coronavirus Recession: consumer prices. That’s because during recessions, consumer price growth decelerates, as does wage growth, which continues to decelerate well after the recession bottoms out. Since monthly changes in inflation are closely correlated with the gas prices, let’s start...

Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing III Robert Waldmann posted his Remdesivir III: I do not understand the need for “evidence-based medicine” or rather I do not understand how the phrase is used by doctors. There is no evidence that Covid 19 patients (without heart disease) do better without Chloroquine. I learn that “evidence based medicine” does not imply choosing the therapy that a fair balance of evidence suggests is best for the patient. Pharmaceuticals...