Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

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...

by Joseph Joyce When Safe Assets Are No Longer Safe The U.S. has long benefitted from its ability to issue “safe assets” to the rest of the world. These usually take the form of U.S. Treasury bonds, although there was a period before the 2008-09 global financial crisis when mortgage-backed securities with Triple A ratings were also used for this purpose. The inflow of foreign savings has offset the persistent current account deficits, and put...

The Elixir of Commerce McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy: being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica: together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M’Vickar. New York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton...

The Moral Philosophers’ Stone: A Compleat History of ‘A Certain Quantity of Labour to be Performed’ Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as “the lump of labor.” To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th-century political economist of the...

RJS, Focus on Fracking US oil supplies are at a 14 – year low; commercial crude supply at a 42 month low, SPR at a 19½ year low; total oil + products supplies at a 95 month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending March 25th indicated that even after a big decrease in our oil exports, we had to take oil out of stored commercial crude supplies...