Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

In the Paul Krugman vs. Nate Silver cage match, I’m on Team Nate Prof. Paul Krugman and Nate Silver got into a dust-up earlier this week about why so many voters seem to have soured on the Democrats. So that you don’t have to go digging through all the Twitter detritus, Alternet has a good write-up copying all the relevant tweets. (Apparently, the two have been at odds at least since 2014, when Five Thirty-Eight left The NY Times and went to ESPN;...

The Obsolescence of Nostalgia As the crow flies, it is around 200 kilometers from Michilimakinac, where Kandiaronk’s Wyandot people settled in 1671, when he was around twenty years old, to Tehkummah on Manitoulin Island where Isabel Paterson was born 215 years later.  It gets even cozier because the Wyandot had been displaced from the south shore of Georgian Bay by the Iroquois Five Nations, who around the same time also displaced the Oddawa,...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. After several weeks of tightening and then inversion, the yield curve in the US Treasury market un-inverted in a big way this past week – via higher long term rates which drove mortgage rates above 5%, which will have a decidedly negative effect on housing. As usual, clicking over and reading should be educational for...

If readers are wondering what is the US doing to alleviate the rising prices of oil during the pandemic and the Russian invasion, RJS has written a good summation of what is going on in the US and where we might be during the drawdown of the SPR. It is dense reading due to the detail. RJS’s Summary; US oil supplies at a 14-year low; SPR at a 19½ year low; distillates exports at a 21 month high; total oil + products exports at a 2 year high The...

The avian influenza does not seem to be letting up with multiple states reporting cases, including Texas. Here is the current map of reported cases. The USDA and USGS have been doing a good job of tracking and confirming cases through APHIS, and the surprising news that has all of us in the poultry business worried is that this is a highly pathogenic virus that is transmitted through wild birds and domestic alike. Sparrows, crows, cardinals and...

Scenes from the March jobs report; and the Great Resignation as “Take This Job and Shove It!”  It’s been a little while since I took a more in-depth look at the jobs market, so let’s take a look. As I wrote last Friday, we are at historic lows in both the unemployment and underemployment rates. In the graphs below, the current values of each are normed to zero for easy comparison: Historically few people are involuntarily unemployed....

You ever have those facts wedged in your mind so deep that you feel that it is the bottom of your foot truth? That full contact, no holds barred, yes I know this? It happens to most of us. And recently me. A few days ago I wrote about the strata of agricultural land use with a bit of this nonsense: For context, about 425 million acres is total farmland in the US, with three quarters going to direct croppage and the last quarter to livestock and...

You had to be around in 1973 to understand what happened when the Middle East decided to cut back on oil. At first, they thought the US would react harshly and invade. We did not. Instead, there were long lines where I lived. If I was near my university on the outskirts of Chicago, the lines did not exist. So, I would fill up my Datsun 510 and scoot home. At times I would take a gas can with me, get it filled, so we could fill up the tractor at...

This might be a very long confused post or might be a series of confused posts. I am trying to think about what to do about Putin (assuming he isn’t overthrown in a palace coup). My first thought was that this is not time for increased military spending . The Russian military turns out to be much less capable than we thought. There is no reason to guess that the Chinese, North Korean, Iranian, or other potential trouble maker militaries are...

As we rounded out the month of March the USDA has been busy assessing the planted acres around the United States, reported the 31st of March. Much to my prior post, there are not really any surprises as the data has indicated that the planting is mirroring last year…with a few caveats, most namely the switch of 4% moving to soy from corn. Let’s take a look at the estimates from the FBN group and their phone survey they conducted a week or so ago...