Taken from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Gross Domestic Product (Third Estimate), Corporate Profits (Revised Estimate), and GDP by Industry, Second Quarter 2024 and Annual Update Partial Report: Real gross domestic product (GDP) is increasing at an annual rate of 3.0 percent as shown in the second quarter of 2024 (table 1). This is according to the “third” estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP...

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. There was a slight fading of several indicators in the short leading and coincident sphere, but overall the positive and improving trend continues. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the economy, and reward me a little bit for organizing and presenting it to you. The Bonddad Blog Weekly Indicators for...

A history lesson of what not to do and yet may still come to pass. October 5th, 2024 by Prof. Heather Cox – Richardson Letters from an American More politics rather than economics. Some of it does fit. The concept is political for an upcoming election. William McKinley is having a moment (which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write).  Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elevating McKinley, a representative...

From Prof. Timothy Snyder’s substack “Thinking about…” Shared with permission:“Think about the politicians Trump idolizes, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The first undid a democracy through fake emergencies, the second through persistent constitutional abuse. It is not hard to see why Trump likes them. “Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country....

One of the biggest issues in the US is who lives in poverty and how it is determined. People get upset when there are people living on food stamps. Unfortunately, many of us do not know how the government does determine poverty. I am hoping this may explain it somewhat. This report is providing estimates of two measures of poverty: the Official Poverty measure and the more recent Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). Used since the 1960s, the...

When usefulness is more important than precision This is a bit like a physicist saying, “Throwing a cricket ball at a window doesn’t cause it to break. Rather, giving an object of approximately spherical shape with a given density a certain velocity in a fluid medium of a certain density and viscosity within a gravitational field of a certain magnitude causes a silicone-based compound in a certain quantity of certain dimensions with certain reflective and...

Some of the worst performing cars ever made looked great on the outside and had serious mechanical, etc. problems. Made in America and were flashy but they could not mechanically perform as well or last. It took a while before many of us growing up started to walk past the flash and bought something more dependable. With Trump selecting Vance he gains the flash . . . however, neither Republican candidate is dependable for US citizens. All flash and...

 – by New Deal democrat Recently I have paid much more attention to the ISM services index. That’s because, since the turn of the Millennium, manufacturing’s share of the economy has contracted to the point where even a significant decline in that index has not translated into an economy-wide recession, as for example in 2015-16.  When we use an economically weighted average of the non-manufacturing index (75%) with the manufacturing index...

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is everywhere—salad dressings, catsup, carbonated beverages. Fructose is sweeter, per unit mass, than cane sugar (sucrose), and apparently keeps better, so is a favored sweetener by the food industry. Unlike glucose, fructose in converted to free fatty acid in the liver and thus can contribute to hyperlipidemia, diabetes and heart disease.I’ve avoided high fructose corn syrup mostly because ever since I stopped eating...

R. J. Sigmund September 29, 2024 The major Covid demographic metrics we track continued to trend lower this past week, but we have a new recombinant mutant out there that is multiplying quite rapidly and is forecast to become the dominant strain, probably just in time for the annual winter holidays infection wave. Among the CDC’s “early indicators” “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, fell to 11.6%...