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July job growth rose just 73,000, but May/June were revised down 258,000! Average May/June/July job growth is a dismal 35,000/month, the worst three-month stretch since 6/20. Worse, unemployment rose to 4.2% despite the labor force falling by 35,000 and the…

The Friday File: Singer-song writer, and satirist extraordinaire Tom Lehrer has died at 97. He graduated Harvard with a BA in math at 18, taught at Harvard/MIT, worked at Los Alamos, and the NSA, but his greatest talent was writing…

25Q2 GDP growth jumped to 3% seasonally and inflation adjusted, up considerably from -0.5% in 25Q1. This puts 25H1 growth at 1.25%, down from 2.5% in 24H1. Importantly, final sales to private domestic purchasers, which strips out volatile trade, government…

Rigid Rates With equities at record highs, credit spreads super-tight, commodities near three-year highs, Bitcoin sky-high, first-time unemployment claims at a three-month low of 217K, the unemployment rate at just 4.1%, and car sales running at roughly 16 million/year, there…

Of all sectors of the US economy, AI seems poised to have more immediate impact on healthcare than probably any other. The combination of it being huge (17.6% of GDP), in possession of a uniquely high volume of unstructured data…

The Friday File: Zipf’s Law describes the relationship between the rank of a word and its frequency, namely that word frequency is inversely proportional to word rank. For example, the most common word will appear twice as often as the…

On one hand, the Fed sees short- to medium-term inflationary pressures building from a 1000% tariff increase, OBBBA fiscal stimulus, possibly rising wages due to manufacturing job onshoring, combined with the number of unemployed manufacturing workers available to work near…

While cinching a trade deal with Japan is good news, hold the applause. Pre-trade war, the tariff on non-agricultural Japanese imports was 1.6%, it’s now 9x higher at 15%. Consumers will eventually feel this. The deal also calls for $550…

I expect annualized 25Q2 GDP growth of about 2%, resulting in 25H1 annualized growth of, at best, 1%, vs. 2.3% for 24H1. As for 25H2, annualized GDP growth will probably be 1%, meaning CY2025 growth of 1%, anemic, but not…

Housing starts continued falling in June, dropping 0.5% Y-o-Y from 6/24’s already depressed level and are at their worst June level (outside Covid) since 2019. Making matters worse, single-family activity fell 4.6% M-o-M, after falling 2.3% in May and is…