Month: March 2017

One of the most popularly traded commodities is Brent crude oil, which comes from a North Sea field. Starting in 2002, declining Brent production necessitated Brent transactions also including Forties from the UK and Oseberg from Norway. In 2007, Norwegian…

After examining the amount of physician-related spending on various tests, scans, x-rays and examinations ordered by almost 22,000 general internists and hospitalists – doctors that work exclusively in a hospital, but do no invasive procedures – over almost 500,000 distinct…

The Friday File: 56.1% of Americans will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, 82.5% of them will wear green, and the average amount spent to celebrate will be $38/person; $5.3 billion, equal to the GDP of Bermuda. St. Patrick’s Day is the…

16Q4 GDP growth was a perfect microcosm of US economic activity of the last several years. GDP growth was a disappointing 1.9%, albeit par for the course of late. More importantly, household consumption, 69% of GDP, grew a solid 2.97%…

In 2006, US net farm income was $57.7 billion. It then rose in five of the next seven years, peaking in 2013 at $123.7 billion. Since then, farm income has steadily declined, falling to $68.5 billion in 2016 and is…

The worst recession in Brazil’s history is two years old. Brazil’s GDP declined 3.8% in 2015 and 3.6% in 2016, a decline totaling 7.26%. If you add Brazilian population growth during those years, per capita GDP declined by a whopping…

February’s net job growth was 235,00 and January’s number was revised up 11,000 to 238,000! The unemployment rate declined to 4.7%, the labor force grew by 340,000, Y-o-Y wage growth rose from 2.6% to 2.8%, those working part-time involuntarily declined…

The Friday File: After controlling for ethnicity, age, socioeconomic factors and so on, volunteers were better able to match up names of people to their pictures than chance. In an example, with four photos and four names, volunteers got the…

On 3/1/17, the current economic expansion entered its 93rd month, making it the third longest in US history. Heretofore, that title went to the 92 month long, 1982-1990 Morning-in-America recovery. The longest, the 1991-2001 10-year Tech Boom recovery. If this…