Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Manufacturing, construction, and job openings all show an economy under stress – by New Deal democrat As usual, we begin another month with important manufacturing and construction data. Additionally, the JOLTS report for September was also released. The ISM manufacturing index has a very long and reliable history. Going back almost 75 years, the new orders index has always fallen below 50 within 6 months before a recession, and in three...

Cheap labor versus Innovation . . . “Dutch innovators vs Dutch farmers,” The one-handed economist, David Zetland. This past weekend, I visited the Dutch Design Week exposition in Eindhoven (home of Philips). There were  hundreds thousands of interesting (and sometimes baffling) displays, demos and ideas scattered around town. One that caught my eye was from a team trying to sell an “easy harvesting” devise that could be used on small-scale...

The Humiliation Of Hu Jintao  The recently completed onec-every-five-years Party Congress in China, which confirmed Xi Jinping for a third term as General Secretary of the party, punctuated his apparent assumption of essentially total power by humiliating his predecessor, Hu Jintao, in its final session. At the beginning, he was forced to leave the session, with two men clearly pulling on his clothing in a widely seen video to make him get up and...

Two posts are at the bottom of this one. Just talking about on-purpose emission of exhaust by pickup trucks which have had the emissions control devices altered. They did this to blow black exhaust out of their exhaust. This report on Treehugger is an update on how well the world is doing. Simple terms, it ain’t. The goal with the implementation of conditional NDCs, plus additional net-zero commitments, was to achieve a 1.8°C rise. The United...

“A global house-price slump is coming,” The Economist, edited. I find this article to be interesting although I do not agree with much of it. Prices are an issue; but so are interest rates. Much of the costs of housing can also be from house manufacturing waste. I was watching my new home being built. The scrap is horrendous. The do-overs because of a lack of critical path are numerous. Quality is inspected into homes and not built into a home. I...

Lifted from notes from David Zetland’s news letter Interesting Stuff: The sustainability challenge is not population as much as consumption. Me in 2009: “A sustainable economy is like a sustainable lifestyle: Minimize your consumption, put something away for a rainy day, and MAKE SURE that you are selling good quality at a good price.” NYT 2022: “By any standard, American lives have become excessive and indulgent, full of large homes, long trips,...

Q3 GDP: good news for now, bad news for the future  – by New Deal democrat I have to keep this note brief, since I am on the road. As you presumably already know, real GDP was positive for the Third Quarter, up 2.6% at an annual rate: Subject to revisions in the next several months of course, but for the moment, this puts to rest ideas that the US economy was in a recession earlier this year, since the decline was very shallow and not...

Infidel753, Putin’s war comes home. For most of the duration of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the majority of Russians have either supported the aggression or at least not objected too energetically.  The war did not affect them much, except insofar as Western sanctions did.  That is now changing, thanks to Putin’s ill-advised and stunningly incompetent mass mobilization. Authorities are now simply grabbing men more or less at random off the...

Quite a few varying articles in healthcare and other topics this week. Pfizer is hoping to make a killing on it mRNA vaccine, shots are approved for 6 months to five-years of age, Medicare Advantage plans, and Novartis is back again with a cancer drug. A COA has blocked student loan relief, lots of talk about housing being blown-up, etc. Is business struggling over the last two years? Read about GM’s spectacular 3rd qtr, 2022. The bottom 50% of...

How can this be?  September 28, 2022, we have Senator Bernie Sanders tweeting (I don’t, guess I need to eat some bird seed). The obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore or sweep under the rug. A society cannot sustain itself when so few have so much while so many have so little. Here is Bernie’s findings as supplied by the Congressional Budget Office. Note the dark...