While the US debt just crossed the $40 trillion mark, what matters much more is debt held by the public, and it’s “only” $32.3 trillion. The difference is intragovernmental debt. But even that number needs context. The critical number: the…
The business sector has been liquidating physical inventories for five straight quarters. If companies were expecting future inflation, they would be building inventories to avert further cost increases —not to mention capturing the IVA revaluation in earnings. Conversely, in 2021…
In CY2023, net job growth averaged 210,000/month; in CY2024, 122,000/month; in CY2025, 10,000/month; and from 1/26–7/26, it’s 61,000/month. Job growth has clearly slowed, partly due to changing immigration policies. Other factors, including Boomer retirements and fewer births, no doubt play…
July retail sales rang in at a dismal -0.6% M-o-M, and, adjusted for inflation, were slightly worse at -0.7%. Moreover, the “control group” retail sales number, which feeds directly into the personal consumption segment of GDP, contracted 0.4%. But don’t…
The Friday File: Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer with 35% of global production, mostly arabica beans, a variety widely used in premium/specialty coffees. Coffee output is reported in 60kg bags of unroasted coffee. Brazil’s production is 63 million…
To solve rising electricity prices for consumers stemming from the growth of energy-hungry AI data centers, make data centers the first group subject to power cuts during grid stress. This will strongly encourage data centers to bring their own power…
July CPI came in at 0.1% and core CPI 0.2%. This brought the Y-o-Y trend for CPI to 3.4%, from 3.5% last month, and core CPI to 2.5% from 2.6% last month. Better yet, three-month core CPI is at 1.6%…
Recent research finds tariffs announced on 4/2/25 increased prices of goods three ways. They directly raised the price of imported goods by 1.5 percentage points. Tariffs also raised the price of imported inputs and that raised inflation by half a…
While only a few months of data, July lost 23,000 jobs, and May and June were revised down by 103,000 combined. Although unemployment fell to 4.1%, it was only because the labor force participation rate slid to 61.4%, which outside…
The Friday File: The humble anchovy is the primary ingredient in fishmeal, making it essential to production of salmon/seabass/shrimp. The expected El Niño could sharply reduce anchovy catches, creating shortages, perhaps dwarfing the impacts of the 1997 El Niño because…