The New York Federal Reserve released the results of its January Empire State Manufacturing Survey today, and the survey’s index fell to the lowest level reported since the covid panic in 2020. Moreover, if we exclude the covid recession, we find that January’s drop in the index is the largest reported in more than thirty years.
According to the New York Fed’s summary:
Late last week President Biden started a new US war on the tiny country of Yemen. US warships and fighter jets launched more than a hundred missiles at the country in a massive escalation that the Administration bizarrely claimed would “de-escalate” tensions in the Red Sea.
Most of us have heard of “critical race theory” (CRT) and know that it’s a bad thing, but few know exactly what it is. It’s imperative that we understand this grave danger, and what I would like to do in this week’s column is to make readers thoroughly acquainted with it and to set forward some objections to it.
“That’s not cool. That’s not cool. They’re just being greedy pigs.” The Chiefs-Dolphins wild card playoff game is only being shown on Peacock, NBCUniversal Media Corp’s streaming service, and that was the reaction of the former Round Mound of Rebound and current professional pontificator Charles Barkley when he called in to @Balltalksource. “They” being the NFL.
Proponents of modern monetary theory (MMT) are back in action after a quiet spell during the embarrassing (for them) record price inflation of 2021–23. They are here to tell us that the mountain of government spending and debt is nothing to worry about; the government’s red ink is the private sector’s black ink, they say. Private sector growth emanates from public sector deficits, and since the US government has a gigantic money printer, there’s no reason to ever fear a default or debt crisis.
In his important book The Failure of American Conservatism (2023), the political theorist and philosopher Claes G. Ryn offers some criticisms of libertarianism and free-market capitalism, and in this week’s column, I’d like to examine these.
As the 2024 general election gets closer, Democrats and proestablishment pundits are growing frustrated with the American public for not feeling as good about the economy as the so-called experts say they should. The elitism of this view aside, it is true that traditional economic indicators are pretty good and that, at the same time, people aren’t feeling good about the economy.
Over the past two years, the Biden administration has repeatedly insisted that job growth is amazing, and that the administration has “created” millions of jobs. In reality, of course, much of the job growth that did exist was the predictable job growth that came with the end of forced business closures and lockdowns. Job growth was also fueled by rising aggregate demand fueled by runaway growth in government spending.
Net saving as a percentage of gross national income has been negative since the first quarter of 2023. The current period of negative net savings is only the third time that net saving has gone negative in more than 75 years. Looking back to the late 1940s, we find that the overall trend in net saving increased during the post-war period of economic retrenchment in the 1950s and early 60s.
