Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

February jobs report: a Big Win!, NDd There were two main trends I was looking for in this jobs report:  1. Is the pace of job growth beginning to decelerate?  2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating? The answers were: 1. The 6-month average of monthly gains, which was running at 548,000 in the 2nd half of 2021, increased in February to 582,000. 2. Wage growth, which averaged 5.9% in the 2nd half of 2021, is now up 6.7%...

The cleric Th. Chalmers, in the otherwise in many respects ridiculous and repulsive work… has correctly struck upon this point, ‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’ The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers’s “otherwise…...

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to the center stage if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial...

RJS, Everything Got Worse . . . US oil supplies at a 13-year low; SPR at a 19 1/2-year low, total oil + products supply at a 94-month low after across the board draws; distillate supplies at a twenty-seven-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 February 25th indicated that after a big jump in our oil exports and a drop in our oil...

February car sales decline, but truck sales continue rebound; plus a comment about the urgency of dealing with supply chain issues I used to follow vehicle sales more closely – until the vehicle manufacturers, one by one, stopped reporting monthly, and only updated quarterly for the previous quarter. That makes the data much less timely, so much less useful. Fortunately the BEA does keep track of sales, although for some reason FRED is only...

World wide, wearing masks prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When vaccines became widely available, they prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Both could have saved many more lives, prevented many more hospitalizations but for opposition to masking and vaccination. So why were so many Americans opposed to the requiring of wearing masks and vaccination? “An...

As winter has begun to subside (finally) the real flurry of activity has to happen in short time, as in an every ray of sunshine has to be captured kind of thrust into the growing season. This is also the poorest time you will see farmers as they dump their entire wealth into yet another growing season. I can confirm; we’ve been running for a week straight and have committed the kids toothfairy money to compost, with no end in sight. My son will...

War, Waste, and the Myth of Progress In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse listed four authors — Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, William H. White, and Fred J. Cooks — whose works were of “vital importance” to his analysis. In the text, he mentioned “the affluent society” several times, which, of course, was the title of a famous book by John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith, Mills, and White all cited Thorstein Veblen in...

Manufacturing continues red hot, while construction gains completely consumed by inflation February monthly data started out this morning with the ISM manufacturing report. The index, especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector.  In February the index rose from 57.6 to 58.6, as did the more leading new orders subindex, which rose from 57.9 to 61.7. Since the breakeven point between...

RJS, MarketWatch 666 Here I (run75441) am being lectured by the author, RJS. “last week you asked me to write something explaining how & why the GDP deflators were revised. So I did, expanding the paragraph I was going to write on it to six, and included it as an addendum to my usual reporting on the GDP revision at Marketwatch 666, however, three days after I sent it to you, it’s still not up on AB. I think it’s important, and that it...