Jobless claims edge up to 198,000, higher than expected
Initial filings for unemployment insurance ticked higher last week but remained generally low in a tight labor market. Jobless claims for the week ended March 25 totaled 198,000, up 7,000 from the previous period and a bit higher than the 195,000 estimate, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Though the number was slightly higher than expectations, […]
Let’s Cut the Budget Nonsense
The Biden administration has floated another bloated budget, one that will put the US national debt at $43.6 trillion by 2033, assuming its optimistic growth and interest-rate projections pan out and the Ukraine war ends. If this budget passes, the debt will hit 110 percent of GDP, federal spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP, […]
China is now an unlikely safe haven
Financial crises ruin and reallocate wealth. They also reallocate worry. Investors find themselves agonising about things they never used to fret about. Worse, they fret about things they never used to think about. One example is money in the bank. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (svb) in America has made depositors newly familiar with […]
Which countries have escaped the middle-income trap?
Over the past half-century, many promising economies have become ensnared in middle-income mediocrity. To help its biggest client avoid this fate, the World Bank published a flagship report ten years ago entitled “China 2030”. The publication warned of the “middle-income trap”, a term to describe the phenomenon. “Of 101 middle-income economies in 1960, only 13 […]
How rare-gas supply adapted to Russia’s war
Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war The war in Ukraine has reconfigured global flows of oil and gas. Less visible has been its impact on another supply chain: that of the so-called rare gases—neon, krypton and xenon—which are used in everything from chipmaking to medicine to space propulsion. Russia and Ukraine […]
Not enough housing? Let the market in.
In 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government passed its famous Housing Act. This gave five million council house tenants in England and Wales the ‘Right to Buy’ their house from their local authority at a discount reflecting rent previously paid. For Thatcher, it was the perfect mix of ideological and practical politics. It made ‘public’ assets […]
