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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– by New Deal democrat Let’s take our usual weekly look at jobless claims, along with stock prices 1/2 of my “quick and dirty” forecasting method. And they continued to forecast expansion. Initial claims declined -8,000 for the week to 208,000, with the four week moving average declining -4,750 to 214,250. With the typical one […]

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Wholesale and Producer Price Index decreasing. Results of backing away from a war posture. Some of which is the result of a ceasefire. Oil prices increasing again after war was declared again by Tr__p. I suspect higher gasoline prices even if not driven by oil or processing costs. It can always be blamed on the […]

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Confessions of a deeply embarrassed American. Politics and Prejudices and other musings – Jack Lessenberry July 1 was Canada Day, the official celebration of Canada’s birth as a nation, and for the second time in three years, I went to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to celebrate and watch the fireworks from my hotel on St. […]

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It’s another example of how we are in this weird and uncanny political moment in which Trump’s politics have broken free of the constraints of public opinion. (It’s reminiscent of a mob bust-out where you rapidly strip a business of its value with no concern for the future because you’re just going to burn it […]

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“Producer price declines are ‘less good’ than consumer price declines, and on net that’s ‘bad‘”  – by New Deal democrat I pay a lot less attention to producer prices than to consumer prices. Partly that is because in the past few decades, the PPI has tended to be coincident with the CPI rather than leading […]

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