Month: May 2020

The Friday File: While only 38% of eggs are consumed outside the home, in places like restaurants and schools, 54% of pork and beef are eaten in such places. That percentage rises to 59% for turkey and 60% for chicken.…

Surprisingly, healthcare was responsible for almost half of the 5% seasonally adjusted annual rate of decline in 20Q1 GDP, despite the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. Turns out 1.5 million healthcare workers lost jobs in Q1 because hospital and doctors’ office revenues collapsed.…

Housing is rebounding surprisingly well! Home prices are solidly rising by the low to mid-single digits, new home sales probably bottomed in March at 619,000, first-time mortgage applications are up 9% Y-o-Y after being down 35% just six weeks ago,…

While the personal savings rate has skyrocketed from 7.5% in 12/19 to 13.1% in 3/20, and wage growth has jumped from 3%/year in 12/19 to 7.9%/year in 4/20, the two are unrelated. Wages are up because many low wage workers…

The Friday File: The most foul-mouthed film, based on swears/1,000 words is Nil by Mouth at 41.3, followed by Uncut Gems at 35.1 and The Wolf of Wall Street (TWWS) at 29.4. Counting by number of swear words/movie, TWWS wins…

Tragically, 38.6 million persons have lost jobs since mid-March. While that number will grow over the next 6 weeks, it is slowing and should hopefully plateau by July. Thus, initial unemployment claims is no longer the key labor number. Rather,…

Since peaking in 2007 at six billion tons, US carbon dioxide emissions have steadily fallen and were roughly 5 billion tons in 2019, a level first breached in the late 1980s. Falling coal consumption, from a peak of 1,150 million…

April housing starts came in at 891,000, down 29.7% Y-o-Y and a level last consistently seen in 2013, but through April starts are up 3.7% YTD. Starts will probably be down Y-o-Y for the next four or five months but…

In a proposed merger that regulators must prevent, Uber Technologies is trying to acquire Grubhub for $6 billion. Grubhub competes directly with Uber subsidiary Uber Eats. The combined firm would control slightly more than half of the third-party meal delivery…

The Friday File: Back in the heyday of TV 1955-2000, when there were growing numbers of local TV affiliates, the average TV series lasted two years and had about 20 episodes/year. With the rise of streaming and away from syndication,…