Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Conventional Macroeconomics Rears Its Head  It is always annoying to have to admit one has been wrong.  But I was among those who a year ago or so was going along with those who argued inflation was transitory and the rate would probably come down later in the year.  The annoying Larry Summers, along with the somewhat less annoying Olivier Blanchard, prominently argued the contrary, hauling out old-fashioned conventional macroeconomic arguments...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 21 – 25 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The walls closed in a little more on the long leading forecast this week, as now real money supply is beginning to falter. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you thoroughly up to date, and will reward me a little bit for giving you a heads up as to what awaits, economically, in the future....

Outside of agriculture there is a feeling of vast quantities, that farmers produce too much corn, soybeans, cotton, and other monocrops in a habitat destroying, bee killing, rural, backward, government sponsored enterprise that is slowly adding to climate change and environmental destruction. Agriculture is largely reactionary and heavily influenced by capitalism. If the need is there, and the price is right, the crop will be produced. One of the...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, US oil supplies are at a 13½ year low, but oil exports are at a 8 month high; SPR at a 19½ year low after biggest draw since Aug 2011, gasoline exports at a 39 month  high; distillate supplies at a 95 month low, total oil + products supplies at a 95 month low after across the board drawdowns. The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the...

To be very clear; there is no chance (as in zero, nada, ganz sicher nicht, rien, none) that NATO will invade Russia. Never was. There is no chance that the United States would ever invade Russia (everyone knows we only invade much smaller countries). No one knows the both better than Vladimir Putin. The fear of invasion by NATO, the EU, or the United States was not why he invaded Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine. Putin invaded Ukraine because,...

Org-Dimensional Man In 1959, Harold Rosenberg wrote the essay “The Orgamerican Phantasy,” published in The Tradition of the New. Rosenberg’s essay criticized the “post-radical” self-absorption of several of the same authors — William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard — that Herbert Marcuse would subsequently praise in the Introduction to One-Dimensional Man for the “vital importance” of their work. In Vance Packard and American Social...

Why War Might Go On Longer  An unfortunate reason the current war in Ukraine might go on longer than it should (with the should here being that it should never have happened in the first place, and the sooner it stops the better, with the onus here clearly on V.V. Putin to stop it as he started it without any justification), is that wartime leaders get a puff in their popularity at least for awhile and are let off the hook on domestic problems. ...

1974 Redux?  The stock of Thomas Robert Malthus rises and falls with the real price of food. He was not the inventor of his theory of population, a point that Karl Marx threw at him among other criticisms, with such people as James Anderson and Benjamin Franklin preceding him with pretty much the entiretly of his theory. But his timing was much better, publishing the flawed first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, a year...

RJS, Focus on Fracking; Oil prices went on another wild ride, but i’m going to copy what I wrote on the monthly OPEC report here. The oil surplus, albeit small, surprised me. If it was going to happen, it would be during the winter for most of the planet’s driving population. Note this is for February, before the Russian sh*t really hit the fan . . . February global oil surplus of 360,000 barrels per day is first in 13 months, despite OPEC...

Green grass is growing finally down south as some rainfalls are being received east of the Colorado River, not that Colorado River, the other one that moves through Austin, and has very little to do with it’s namesake. Grass growing in the spring brings on the grazing and let’s the ranchers get off the expensive feed. Now is also the time to sow sorghum for the herds to clear in the next few months. Net, net it’s still an expensive business to be...