Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

I looks as if I might disagree with Paul Krugman for barely more than once. I admit I am following Brad DeLong (and also that I surfed there from Kevin Drum). The discussion is over what hurt blue collar US workers, automation, China or two recessions. Yang says it is automation. Krugman disagrees in a tweet thread noting that productivity growth has been slow (I do absolutely agree with Krugman that Twitter is horrible and that blogs are better). I will...

The New York Times: A Propaganda Machine for Trump The Times thinks it’s leading the forces of reason and light against Donald Trump, but it doesn’t have a clue.  Every day their front page is festooned with the latest noxious Trumpian remark, followed by paragraphs of commentary on how unprecedented it is for a president to talk this way and how appalled most politicians and political observers are.  They think Trump is making one mistake after...

Rice Prices Rising In North Korea According to nkecon, on April 30 the price of rice in the DPRK was 4070 won per kg, but as of June 25 it had risen 26 percent to 5147 won per kg, the highest in many years.  The price of corn has also sharply risen although not quite as high abovee recent levels as has the price of rice.  However, the price of pork has fallen, reflecting standard corn-hog relations, and per capita incomes appear to have fallen.  Crop...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 24 – 28 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Not a lot of movement in any individual indicators, but manufacturing in particular moved very close to a downgrade.

Initial jobless claims: positive this week, but close to crossing two thresholds for concern I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. The four week average is 9.8% above its recent low: On a weekly basis, YoY the...

Manufacturing job losses now look virtually certain I’ll have a post going up at Seeking Alpha later, but between a steep decline in the manufacturing work week, lackluster regional Fed manufacturing indexes (still barely positive), a turndown in durable goods orders (in part due to Boeing’s woes), and increasing inventories, it now looks nearly certain that there will be an actual decline in manufacturing jobs over the next twelve months. To put this in...

Whither The Price Of Oil? I do not know, which is a kind of silly way to start a post, but pretty obviously this is an opening to talk about some other matters, especially the US-Iran situation.  However, I want to point out some things  that have been on my mind.  In particular, while oil price volatility has not been super extreme recently compared to some movements in the last decade and a half, the degree of uncertainty and confusion about what is...

New home sales: is housing developing a price “choke collar”? So, new single family home sales for May were reported light this morning: Because this series is very volatile and heavily revised, as always take this with a grain of salt. To smooth out some of the volatility, I pay more attention to the three month moving average, which at 670k is slightly below that of that average for the past two reports, and also slightly below the late 2017 peak....

New article in Shelterforce highlights EU state aid rules Greg LeRoy and I have written an article at Shelterforce explaining the basics of the European Union’s rules governing subsidies, or “state aid” in EU-speak. As the article is ungated, and regular readers will remember much of the detail, I will not quote it here. Suffice it to say that the continuing reverberations of Amazon’s HQ2 project have opened space to shine a brighter light on economic...

A tale of two timeframes No data today Monday, so while we are waiting for new home sales tomorrow, let me step back a little and give you an updated overview of my thinking. It boils down to: the short term forecast — over the next 4 to 8 months — looks flat at best, and could develop into an actual downturn. The longer term — over one year out — looks more positive. Let me start with the positive long term forecast first. Long term interest rates...