Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Joseph Joyce Risk and FDI While FDI flows recovered in 2021 from the previous year’s decline, not all countries benefitted from the increase. UNCTAD reported that almost three-quarters of global FDI flows in 2021 occurred in advanced economies, and China and other Asian economies recorded the largest increases amongst the emerging markets and developing economies. Multinational companies are evaluating the course of the pandemic in those...

“Labour v capital in the post-lockdown economy,” The Economist. As prices and wages rise, are workers or firms winning? Pulling a brief article from The Economist. Unlike 2008, Labor is surviving due to stimulus packages in 2020/2021, which petered out in 2008 leaving low wages and restrictive Unemployment Benefits. “An economy-wide measure of corporate margins is rising fast. Dario Perkins of TS Lombard, a financial-services firm, breaks...

Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. Planned obsolescence is the desire to own something a little newer and a little better a little sooner than...

Summary Commenter RJS: US oil supplies at a 13 year low, SPR at a 19 year low: total oil + products supplies at a 7 1/2 year low, distillate supplies at 26 month low after refinery freeze off 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 11th indicated that after a big drop in our oil exports, a major slowdown in our oil refining due to...

Reading the first few paragraphs of Last War Brain by Noah Smith, I thought I would strongly disagree with his post and decided to write an attempted rebutal. I find that I agree almost 100% and can mainly complain about what I assert is a bit of bait and switch. As always I advise readers to just click the link. Noah is a much better writer than I am (low bar) so my effort to summarize and explain might best be skipped (skip to ***) Noah argues...

Trying To Make Sense Of The Confusion  On the one hand Russian media is telling Russians that Russian troops will leave Belarus when exercises there end on Feb., 20, coinciding with the end of the Winter Olympics, and also sends out videos of troops supposedly being pulled back. OTOH, US officials declared based on reported satellite evidence that 7,000 more troops have gone to “the Ukrainian border” with a chance of Russia invading Ukraine very...

This is a follow-on to Dan’s commentary on living on the East Coast or in the Southwest region of the country. I live in an area of the Southwest which is not experiencing the harsher impact of climate change. Even so, the higher temperatures create a drier atmosphere, thirsty for moisture, which it draws from a region’s soil, rivers, lakes and the snowpack. This atmospheric demand, called a vapor pressure deficit (“VPD” for short), has reached...

A note on producer prices and (possibly) cooling inflation One point I make from time to time is that, with seasonally adjusted data, YoY comparisons can miss, or at least lag, turning points. We *may* have such a situation developing with producer prices as evidenced by this morning’s report (Feb. 15). On a YoY basis, producer prices for finished goods (red in the graph below) are up 12.5%, while commodity prices are up 19.3%. Consumer...

RJS, Focus on Fracking; Global oil shortage at 440,000 barrels per day in January as OPEC’s output falls 749,000 barrels per day short; 2021’s oil shortage revised to 1.5 million barrels per day OPEC’s January Oil Market Report Thursday of the past week saw the release of OPEC’s February Oil Market Report, which includes details on OPEC & global oil data for January, and hence it gives us a picture of the global oil supply & demand...

The return of the “Oil Choke Collar”! For the first five years after the end of the Great Recession, one of the staples of my analysis was the concept of the “oil choke collar.” By that I meant that typically recessions had occurred after there was a sudden and sharp upward spike in the cost of gas, inflicting such pain that consumers cut back drastically on other spending – causing a prompt economic downturn. But what if, instead, gas prices rose...