Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

October JOLTS report: at least the jobs market isn’t getting any worse in disequilibrium The JOLTS report for October was released this morning. While it did not indicate any significant progress towards a new labor equilibrium, at least the trends did not get any more destabilized. Job openings (blue in the graph below) increased to 11.033 million, which remains below the July peak of 11.098 million. Voluntary quits (the “great resignation,”...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource V — Social costs and common-pool resources  The basic idea behind common-pool resources also has a venerable place in the history of classical political economy and neoclassical economic thought. In the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, Henry Sidgwick observed that “private enterprise may sometimes be socially uneconomical because the undertaker is able to appropriate not less but more...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VI — Withholding labour Superficially, it might seem that the individual worker can deny access to an employer offering unsuitable terms. But it is here we need to factor in that peculiarity of labour-power noted by the silk weaver, William Longson, that a day’s labour not sold on the day it is offered is “lost to the labourer and to the whole community.” “If his capacity for labour remains unsold,” Marx...

Blogger RJS, Focus on Fracking, Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at an 18 1/2 Year Low; Gasoline Supplies Rose by Most in 22 Weeks on a 22 Week Low in Demand The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA Weekly U.S. Ending Stocks excluding SPR of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels) (eia.gov) US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending November 26th showed that after a switch of “unaccounted for crude...

Blogger RJS, Focus On Fracking, OPEC Decides to Increase Production, Natural Gas Prices Fall by the most in 8 years and maybe most ever Oil for the sixth consecutive week this week, as OPEC decided to increase production even as a Omicron surge loomed . . . after falling 10.4% to $68.15 a barrel last week after the discovery of a new Covid variant sent global markets tumbling, the contract price for US light sweet crude for January delivery opened...

Disposable time as a common pool resource IV — disposable time as a common pool resource In his Grundrisse, Marx identified surplus labour time as a form of disposable time. That is to say that, under capitalism, it is labour time at the disposal of capital. “The whole development of wealth,” Marx wrote, “rests on the creation of disposable time.” “In production resting on capital,” he continued three sentences later, “the existence...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource II — Labour is not a commodity  Labour was conventionally regarded as a private good by both classical political economists and conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, who argued, “labour is a commodity like every other, and rises and falls according to the demand.” The counterpoint to that view, since the early 19th century is that labour (power) is not a commodity because it has characteristics that...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource III — Labour power as a common pool resource  Human mental and physical capacities to work have elastic but definite natural limits. Those capacities must be continuously restored and enhanced through nourishment, rest and social interaction. Over the longer term that capacity for labour also has to be replenished by a new generation of youth, reared by the previous generation. It is this combination of...

November jobs report: the only thing keeping the jobs market completely recovering to pre-pandemic levels, is the pandemic itself One month ago, we got very large upward revisions to previous data. This month the big questions I had were whether that would continue and whether the bulge decrease in new jobless claims to a half-century low would translate to another big top line number in the jobs report. Additionally, in view of the recent...

Manufacturing still red hot; construction still very cool Our first November data is out this morning with the forward-looking ISM manufacturing report for October, as well as construction spending for October. Let’s take the ISM report first, since it is an important short leading indicator for the production sector, and in particular its new orders subindex. In November the index rose slightly from 60.8 to 61.1, as did the more leading...