– by New Deal democrat In It appears that both producer and consumer inflation are going to continue at elevated levels, despite the actual *de*flation in June. Here’s a look at the average of the New York and Philadelphia Fed’s prices paid (blue) and prices received (orange) diffusion manufacturing indexes:  In July, the average for prices […]

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Trump’s inability to evaluate expert advice and incorporate it into his thinking will undoubtedly play a large role when histories of the Iran war are written. Trump evidently ignored warnings from experts within the government that Iran would respond to an attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Once the Strait was closed, Trump had […]

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There are instructive parallels between the Trump administration’s trade war with China in the first year of this term and the Iran war that is consuming its second year. In both instances, the administration grossly underestimated its rival’s resilience and capacity to retaliate, then escalated quickly and sharply before learning that the other side controlled […]

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Thomas Edsall (gift link): I asked political and presidential scholars how they think Trump’s mind works. Most pointed to his seemingly exclusive reliance on his own judgment while rejecting expert advice. “Many presidents have made mistakes, but none have made mistakes so cavalierly as President Trump,” Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote by […]

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Mostly informational . . . I subscribe to the New York Times. I do have access to some rather unique articles (in the NYT) such as this one which gives prices per gallon of gasoline by state. The data for the map was obtained from AAA by the New York Times, Map: How Much Have […]

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 The manufacturing sector of the economy continued to improve in June – by New Deal democrat There’s a brief hiatus from new data early this week, so let me briefly look at the manufacturing economy, for which industrial production was reported on Friday. To briefly recap my overall position: despite the chaos coming out of […]

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Robert Reich – “He Can’t Resist“ Here’s you-know-who trying, as ever, to be the center of attention today. This picture was supposed to be about celebrating those who deserved it. Congratulations, Spain — along with apologies for our Malignant Narcissist-in-Chief. Embarrassing for America. He doesn’t know any better . . . It almost appears to […]

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What Charles Gaba is showing the impact of the legislation passed by Congress eliminating ACA subsidies. This largely has an impact on ACA enrollment this year. I am displaying partial of Charles’ Post on his site ACA Signups. Charles is using the CMS database to show ACA enrollment before and after the Republican controlled Congress […]

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“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, saying he would call Canadian Prime […]

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Weekly Indicators: All Timeframes Positive Despite Increase in Oil Prices Despite oil prices heading back north of $80/barrel this past week, the underlying fundamentals in all time frames remain positive, including most importantly consumer spending. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the […]

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This post can be found on Steve Hutkins’ Save The Post Office. He is featuring a commentary taken from the Democracy Docket as linked to in the first paragraph. As is typical, this commentary is all about Pres. Donald Tr__p who is trying his hardest to block the upcoming election or impede it in whatever […]

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What Brian is touching upon is the end of a government program providing loans in rural areas for housing. To be specific, the object was providing below-market-rate loans to private and nonprofit developers who build and manage residential housing for low-income residents in small towns and rural counties. It also kept the rent to 30% […]

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I’ve been reading and thinking about the idea of wealth taxes. In principle, it’s an idea I could support. Too much wealth is controlled by too few in America today. The chief argument I see made against wealth taxes is that they’re impractical. In a literal sense, this is easily falsified. We already have some […]

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Dean Baker on Fast Food and the cuts to it when the economy is slow. The Fast-Food Spending Index is Falling Fast For the last several years I’ve been using real spending at fast food restaurants as a gage for assessing how the non-rich are feeling about their personal finances. The logic is that it […]

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 – by New Deal democrat Last week I wrote at length about how the entire housing market had reached an equilibrium, where almost all of the metrics were more or less flat. Meaning that this important long leading sector for the economy was about as neutral as it could be. This morning’s data on housing permits, […]

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I recently read a history and a biography that are both centered on the American Revolution. It reminded me that for the founding fathers, the ineluctable reality was that they were risking their lives for their beliefs. Josh Marshall has a piece up at TPM about Trump’s effort to extort control over the 2026 elections, […]

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– The one-handed economist (site) Daniel Zetland . . . a political-economist from California who now lives in Amsterdam. I read this 2007 book by John Darwin months ago, but only got ’round to writing up my thoughts here now. That shouldn’t matter about 600 years of history that ended in 2000, but it does matter for […]

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 – by New Deal democrat Let’s take a look at retail sales, especially real retail sales, one of my favorite economic indicators, which was updated for June this morning. This is because consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and also because historically consumption leads employment. Let’s see what happened during a month that gas […]

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Just some simple logic. It is easy enough to blame Tr__p for the decrease in Medicare insolvency. It is his bill which is driving the issue as well as well as other funding issues. Funding issues is no surprise as healthcare costs increased over the years. However, Congress could have acted to resolve the issue […]

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I taught medical students for over 30 years. The bar to admission at Saint Louis University Medical School was pretty high for metrics like GPA and MCAT scores. But as a professor, I realized that crossing those bars was no guarantee of sound judgement. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s CDC director nominee, wasn’t a SLUSOM grad*, but […]

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