Producer prices flat, commodities decline, confirming shelter as sole inflationary pressure  – by New Deal democrat Once again producer prices confirmed that the only significant problem in inflation is shelter. In December commodity prices declined -1.3%. For finished goods they declined -1.2%. Even producer prices for services were unchanged: On a YoY basis, commodity prices are down -3.2%, finished goods prices down -0.2%, and...

Supercharge Your Investments with Margin Loans

Jon Elster and the dangers of excessive ambitions .[embedded content] Most mainstream economists want to explain social phenomena, structures and patterns, based on the assumption that the agents are acting in an optimizing — rational — way to satisfy given, stable and well-defined goals. The procedure is analytical. The whole is broken down into its constituent parts to be able to explain (reduce) the aggregate (macro) as the result of the interaction of...

Our current economic model, premised on profits and returns, consumption, and growth — on greed, has proven to be problematic for the environment, society, and governance.*   Over time, humans have inflicted grave damage to the land, forests, rivers, streams, and atmosphere. Some of this was in the interest of survival. A lot more was done in the interest of greed. Of late, we have done especially grave damage to the atmosphere by burning...

What Charles is telling us is the 21+ million new ACA enrollees is a record. What he also adds at the end of his commentary is this is not the final number. There are more uncounted enrollees to be added to this number from after Christmas. Record year for healthcare coverage. This is good news. BOOM: Biden-Harris Admin announces over 21.6M ACA enrollees thru 12/23, record high w/a week or more left to #GetCovered!, ACA Signups, Charles Gaba...

and we have no one to blame but ourselves. J. P. Jefferson suggested this opinion piece on December 19, 2023. I just ran across J. P. Jefferson’s recommendation again or for the first time, sigh. I just do not remember. I was able to sign into this WSJ Kevin Williamson piece even though I do not have a paid subscription. Sometimes and when you create a logon, they let you have so many freebies per month. Hoping you will subscribe to their...

Thank you for your comments. Bill

Consumer inflation remains all about the lagged effect of house prices  – by New Deal democrat Consumer inflation in December continued to be a tale of the relative importance of gas prices vs. the lagged effect of home prices. Headline inflation increased 0.3%, and was up 3.4% YoY. YoY headline inflation has bounced between 3.1%-3.7% for the past 6 months, i.e., ever since the gas price peak of June 2022 passed out of the YoY comparisons....

Uncovering Revolutionary Roots of Austrian Economics

.[embedded content]