Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XIV: Capital volume III, chapters 38 and 49 I thought this was going to be the final instalment of my review of Marx’s writing on socially necessary labour time but then I discovered, as I was going through my posts that I haven’t done the draft “chapter six” that contains the fascinating discussion of formal and real subsumption. So there will be either one or two mores posts. Yay!! An index page of all the...

Oil in longest losing streak since 2019;  global oil shortage at 2,540,000 barrels per day; DUC well backlog at 7.1 months, Focus on Fracking, Commenter and Blogger, R,J.S. Thursday of last week saw the release of OPEC’s August Oil Market Report, which covers OPEC & global oil data for July, and hence it gives us a picture of the global oil supply & demand situation for the third month of the modest output easing policy initiated by OPEC...

July industrial production (good news) and retail sales (bad news still being pretty good news)  – by New Deal democrat This morning brought the July report for the King of Coincident Indicators, industrial production, as well as one of my favorite consumer side indicators, retail sales. Let’s take a look at each. Industrial sales increased strongly in July, up 0.9% overall, and the manufacturing component up 1.4%. Manufacturing production...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XI, Capital, volume II Aside from a comment on the “labour socially necessary” in Engels’s preface, there is no other mention of socially necessary labour time in volume II of Capital. That preface is where Engels wrote of Marx saving The Source and Remedy from oblivion, albeit with only a single, short innocuous quotation (see also this earlier post).  In the early post, I related how Anton Menger had doubted...

July housing permits and starts: yellow flag for economy in 2022 Last month I noted that, from here on, the comparisons with 2020 in housing would become much more challenging. And so they have. While permits (gold in the graph below) did increase this month, their declining trend remains intact. Starts (blue), and more importantly, single-family permits (red, right scale) – the least volatile measure of all – both decreased again, as they...

Industrial Production Rose 0.9% in July After Prior Four Months Were Revised Higher, RJS at MarketWatch 666 The Fed’s G17 release on Industrial production and Capacity Utilization for July indicated 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 2017 production to equal to...

Three “Fragment[s] on Machines”: überflüssig ist notwendig An excerpt of a passage from the Grundrisse, in the notorious “fragment on machines,” has become iconic in contemporary Marx studies: Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to...

A Half Century Since The Beginning Of The End Of The Post WW II Economic Order  It was also on a Sunday, with financial markets closed, that August 15, 1971, when US President Richard Nixon gave a surprise address to the nation on economic policy.  He made three announcements: 1) a 90-day wage-price freeze, 2) a10 percent across the board tariff on all imports, and most importantly, 3) the closing of the gold window meaning the US...

Gasoline supplies at a 42 month low; natural gas supplies still 16.5% lower than a year ago; offshore Alaska drilling resumes; Commenter Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 This Week’s Rig Count Number of drilling rigs active in the US increased for the 40th time out of the past 47 weeks during the week ending August 13th, but was still down by 36.9% from the pre-pandemic rig count….Baker Hughes reported that the total count of rotary rigs running in...

Here is my inflation worry by New Deal democrat I want to follow up on a comment I made yesterday in connection with Wednesday’s consumer price report. It is certainly true that *inflation* is likely to be transitory. The 5.3% YoY inflation we’ve seen in June and July may certainly pass in the next few months and reduce to a more somnolent number under 3%. Hoorah! Inflation was transitory! But what if the price increases “stick?” In...