Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Joseph Joyce The Global Impact of the Fed’s Pivot on Asset Purchases Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced last month that the Fed would slow its purchases of bonds, most likely by the end of this year. The timing of the cutback will depend on several factors related to the economy, and last week’s disappointing employment report if repeated could push back the date. The financial markets will now begin anticipating the impact of...

Focus on Fracking: natural gas price at a 33 month high; US crude supplies at a 23 month low; Ida shuts down Gulf Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 Oil Prices Oil prices ended slightly higher this week as oil traders apparently judged that Hurricane Ida’s damage to oil production was greater than the storm’s damage to refining and to fuel demand .  .  . after rising more than 10% last week as Chinese virus cases fell to zero, a quarter of Mexico’s...

Trade Deficit Fell 4.3% in July After 2nd Quarter Deficits Were Revised Lower, MarketWatch 666 blogger RJS Our trade deficit fell 4.3% in July as the value of our exports increased while the value of our imports decreased slightly….the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for July indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit decreased by $3.2 billion to a rounded $70.1 billion in July,...

Labeling for Increased Profits, Farmer and Economist, Michael Smith It is a well-known marketing ploy to label, relabel, and even mislabel a product again and again to increase sales. We think of the almighty Coke and the multiple iterations that they have had just on their cans. We’ve also seen consumer products like paper towels that have additives that make a mess disappear much faster, diapers that hold, ahem, waste better, and other...

Analytical Bias The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment.  And all these meta-systems are themselves elements in even more encompassing systems that interconnect them.   But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live,...

August jobs report: some weak points, but the underlying very good trend continues While the NBER has declared that the recession ended in April 2020, neither the King nor Queen of Coincident Indicators, industrial production, and jobs, have recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. The former is only off by -0.2%, but the latter – which is most important to ordinary Americans – as of this morning’s report is still -3.5% below its level in...

2nd Quarter GDP Revised to Indicate Growth at a 6.6% Rate The Second Estimate of our 2nd Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicated that our real output of goods and services grew at a 6.6% rate during the quarter, revised from the 6.5% growth rate reported in the advance estimate last month, as growth in fixed investment and exports was greater than previously estimated, while imports increased less than originally estimated, the...

Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666, Industrial Production Rose 0.9% in July After Prior Four Months Were Revised Higher The Fed’s G17 release on Industrial production and Capacity Utilization for July indicated that industrial production rose by 0.9% in July after rising by a revised 0.2% in June and a revised 0.8% in May, and is now up 6.6% from a year ago . . . the industrial production index, with the benchmark now set for average...

July Durable Goods: New Orders Down 0.1%, Shipments Up 2.2%, Inventories Up 0.6%, Commenter and also Blogger at MarketWatch 666 The Advance Report on Durable Goods Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for July (pdf) from the Census Bureau reported the value of the widely watched new orders for manufactured durable goods fell by $0.4 billion or by 0.1 percent to $246.9 billion in July, following a revised increase of 0.8% to $257.6...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XV: “Chapter Six” from the draft manuscripts of Capital The draft “Chapter Six” was preceded by an earlier version of the analysis of formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. That earlier version is 28 pages long in volume 34 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works. “Chapter Six,” proper, is 111 pages long. The earlier version contains one mention of the “labour socially necessary.” The later version contains...