Jobless claims continue recent strong streak Programming note: I’ll put up separate posts on durable goods orders, real manufacturing and trade sales, and the Q4 GDP reports later. Initial jobless claims have been the best performing – and perhaps only positive – element of the short leading indicators in the past few months. And that continued in this morning’s report. Initial claims declined -6,000 to 186,000, the lowest number since last...

The New Silk Roads, or BRI, as well as the integration efforts of BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU will be on the forefront of Chinese policy.Strategic Culture Foundation (sanctioned by the US Treasury Department)Can You Smell What the Year of the Rabbit Is Cooking?Pepe EscobarSee alsoRussian Foreign Minister Lavrov informed Africans during a press conference while on his latest tour of the continent that India is an independent multipolar powerhouse. His exact words were as follows: “Those...

Setting the record straight. New Keynesianism (typified by Paul Krugman) is not Keynes, nor is it a faithful rendition of John Hicks either.Lars P. Syll’s BlogHyman Minsky and the IS-LM obfuscationLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Total US arms transfers for fiscal 2022 topped $50 billion, up nearly 50 percent from prior year."Winning bigly." MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex), that is. Breaking DefenseFor US, foreign arm sales boom amid Russian invasion, Chinese intimidationLee Ferran

Cullen Roche, CIO of Discipline Funds and author of Pragmatic Capitalism, joins Julia La Roche on episode 50 for a wide-ranging discussion of the macro environment and Housing — the risk keeping him up at night. In this episode, Roche raises the point that when it comes to macro research, a lot of economists argue that the U.S. economy is a housing economy, meaning when the housing market slows down a lot, it filters through everything else. “It’s really up in the...

Hyman Minsky and the IS-LM obfuscation As a young research stipendiate in the U.S. yours truly had the pleasure and privilege of having Hyman Minsky as a teacher. He was a great inspiration at the time. He still is. The concepts which it is usual to ignore or deemphasize in interpreting Keynes — the cyclical perspective, the relations between investment and finance, and uncertainty, are the keys to an understanding of the full significance of his...

“Arizona: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times“, Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar I ran across this substack a few weeks ago. The majestic and excellent basketball player I had watched play a wicked game of ball, can also write good articles. Since I now live in Arizona where the politics differ from my own, I thought this one article on two topics was especially interesting. The new Governor is dismantling the sea-container wall...

Three most quickly reported measures of coincident indicators – all of which are close to turning negative  – by New Deal democrat While we await tomorrow morning’s deluge of Almost Every Economic Series Imaginable, I have posted over at Seeking Alpha a detailed look at one measure of consumer spending and two of employment which will give us extremely timely warnings as to whether a recession has started. I explain their trajectory in the past...

Its been around 9 months since the central banks of the world (bar Japan) started to push up interest rates. This reflected a return to the dominant mainstream view that fiscal policy should aim to support monetary policy in its fight against inflation and thus be biased towards surpluses, while central banks manipulated interest rates to deal with any inflationary pressures. The central banks would somehow form a ‘future-looking’ view that inflation was about to spring up and they would...

It has taken a bit of time after Christmas to get back into the swing of things. A week during Christmas while in Breckenridge, I spent it in bed due to Attitude Altitude sickness. One night I was looking at the vertical wood slats on the wall which appeared to be populated with numbers similar to an Excel Spread Sheet. Looking at numbers and doing quick comparisons in manufacturing, distribution, and planning was a good part of my job. I reached for...