economics

Leading Economic Index (LEI) are outdated and less relevant in today’s economy. Decades ago, manufacturing made up 30% of GDP and 50% of employment—today, it is only 10% of GDP and 14% of jobs. This structural shift means that many recession indicators don’t capture the strength of the modern economy, which remains resilient due to fiscal stimulus

Conversely, if foreign purchases of government bonds lowered a country’s interest rate, the higher a country’s current account surplus, the higher its interest rates should be. Why? Because of the need for the capital and current accounts to balance: the net amount of foreign purchases of U.S. government bonds and other U.S. dollar assets is

In fact we have already seen countries like Japan and Korea complain loudly when large foreign central banks shift out of dollars and into their currencies, and the European response is likely to be no different.

But in any case, machines, inventions and discoveries increase real wages.

The Shah threw himself into a modernization and Westernization of the country, the white revolution: He carried out land reform where land was redistributed to farmers, landlords were compensated for their land by shares of privatized state-owned factories, transport networks were expanded, dam and irrigation projects carried out, malaria

but as a class they cannot save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying.

LBJ's increased government spending added $42 billion, or 13%, to the national debt. It was almost double the amount added by JFK, but less than a third of the debt added by President Nixon. Since Johnson, every president has increased the debt by at least 30%.

Investor and tech pundit Paul Kedrosky says that, as a percentage of gross domestic product, spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing. He also argues that one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending

It’s the most extreme divergence between consumer sentiment and the stock market in over 40 years. This next version of the chart shows the same data, but it’s measured in terms of how far they are off from their highs. We have look back at the early 1980s to find a similarly low sentiment reading while stocks were near their highs: This divergence