Kevin Drum 🕸

The St. Louis Fed's GDP Nowcast is forecasting that GDP growth in Q2 will be 0.28%. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow is forecasting growth of 2.1%. Big difference! So who's right? No offense to the St. Louis folks, but it looks like the Atlanta forecast has a considerably better recent track record. GDP growth in Q2 ...continue reading "Atlanta victorious in dueling GDP forecasts"

Over at the Washington Post, Heather Long says, "If we avoid a recession, we can thank Black and Hispanic workers." I was all set to scoff, but she's right. Here's the basic employment pictire: White workers have only barely recovered their pre-pandemic employment levels while nonwhite workers are all 10-13% higher. But a better metric ...continue reading "Nonwhite workers are powering the economy back to work"

The LA Times has a story today about a couple of fraudulent PACs that scammed both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The bad guys are now behind bars, but I was intrigued by this brief aside: The two groups made more than 275 million robocalls over a 16-month period and netted nearly $4 ...continue reading "Robocall fundraising sure is inefficient"

Normally it takes a couple of days to settle payments in the banking system. But no longer. Later this month the Federal Reserve is introducing FedNow, which allows instant payment settlement 24 hours a day. Are you ready for the 20-minute 4 am bank run? In addition to losing revenue from the time between a ...continue reading "Fed poised to make bank runs easier than ever"

This chart shows total US greenhouse gas emissions—nearly all of it CO2 and methane—for the past two decades by sector: Emissions peaked in 2007 and have fallen 12% since then, due almost exclusively to the fact that we've cut our use of coal-fired power plants in half.¹ These coal plants have largely been replaced by ...continue reading "Raw data: US greenhouse gas emissions"

I'm not really sure why I made this chart: I know that M2 as a measure of money supply isn't taken too seriously these days, and M2 as a cause of inflation even less so. But last night I got curious about the sources of our recent inflation. Is it exclusively a result of reduced ...continue reading "Does M2 still matter?"

According to Gallup, here is Joe Biden's job approval rating right now. It is identical to the past two presidents at the same point in time: Obama's job approval didn't recover until two months before the 2012 election. Trump's never recovered.

The Wall Street Journal blares: The Supermarket Aisle Where Prices Are Still Soaring They're talking about highly processed foods like potato chips—which, in fact, are up only 3.5% since January. Not precisely soaring. And they admit that inflation has eased elsewhere. What they don't admit is that food inflation is gone. Since the start of ...continue reading "Food prices have dropped since the start of the year"

Huh. There's something new every day on weird prestige TV shows.

As we all know, corporations have raised prices substantially over the past couple of years, generating huge windfall profits. Is this "greedflation" the real cause of our recent bout of inflation? In a nutshell, Eric Levitz says no. All that happened is that the pandemic caused supply shortages while government stimulus payments kept demand high, ...continue reading "Greedflation is real, but it’s not the main inflation story"

I am three months away from qualifying for Medicare and everything is going smoothly. HHS already sent me a card, and a couple of days ago Kaiser Permanente sent me a signup form that looks like just what I want. But there is a weird little mystery that I can't figure out. Here is the ...continue reading "A wee mystery about Medicare"

This kind of story bugs me: With the harvesting of wood expected to increase dramatically in coming decades, researchers are warning that policy officials have woefully underestimated logging’s carbon footprint....Between 2010 and 2050, global demand for wood is expected to surge 54%....During that time, greenhouse gas emissions from wood harvests would significantly increase, likely releasing ...continue reading "Climate change is all about fossil fuels, period"

This is extraordinary: Here are the basic stats: Among all Americans, 4.5% of deaths are due to opioid overdoses, mostly fentanyl Among the youngish middle-aged (20-39), 21% of all deaths are due to opioids. Among men in this age group, 30% of all deaths are due to opioids. Now, part of the reason the percentage ...continue reading "Raw data: Opioid deaths in America"

Next week there's a NATO summit in Vilnius and naturally Ukraine is on the agenda. Today, a group of 46 foreign policy experts signed a letter recommending membership for Ukraine as soon as possible: In Vilnius, the alliance should launch a roadmap that will lead clearly to Ukraine’s membership in NATO at the earliest achievable ...continue reading "Remember NATO Article 5?"

Charlie really looks like he means business here. He's obviously a cat with a mission.

On Wednesday Meta launched Threads, a new social media app designed to compete with Twitter. It's already signed up 30 million users, and you'd think this would be broadly welcomed since Twitter users have been bitching forever that Twitter is a cesspool that's only gotten worse since it was purchased last year and subjected to ...continue reading "Threads needs a little time before it descends into bedlam"

Do you think that all the MAGA vaccine denial and mask vitriol is basically harmless? Hell, let 'em do whatever they want to their own bodies and then vent about it on Facebook. There's one group that would disagree: A new survey of physicians and biomedical scientists in the U.S. found that nearly two-thirds experienced ...continue reading "Two-thirds of all doctors have received vicious harassment over COVID-19"

Over at New York, John Herrman pulls no punches describing the American news business: American news is a smoldering wasteland....Cable news is in trouble, the twin threats of streaming and social-media video having sapped it of relevance....Print media is simply disappearing in much of the country, and where it still exists, it is in barely ...continue reading "Journalism is doomed! Journalism is better than ever!"

The American economy gained a meager 209,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at an even more meager 119,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.6%. This is a bad report, but at least there ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in June"

I don't have any special reason for writing this post. There's no hook. It's just something that bears knowing about. The failure of Democrats to maintain support among the white working class is a frequent topic of concern. But the truth is that it's not really a thing. Not nationally, anyway. Democrats have lost a ...continue reading "Democrats and the non-South"