Free Republic

The world is facing a long list of troubles often isolated to specific regions. Still, one issue experts warn is just on the horizon is a global food shortage that is likely to threaten every country. Farmers everywhere are already noting there is a shortage of fertilizers needed to keep crop yields at their highest levels to feed the nearly 8 billion people of the world. Last year, for instance, U.S. Army Special Forces veteran and author Michael Yon told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily that all of the 26 major plants in Europe that produce nitrogen-based fertilizers are either closed...

In a new survey conducted in January, Americans said the government/poor leadership is “the most important problem facing this country today.” The second most important problem cited is inflation. […] Immigration was in third place, cited by 11% of adults; economy in general, 10%; and race relations/racism, 5%. On the political scale, 24% of Republicans said government was the number one problem, as did 18% of Democrats. […] In this latest survey, economic confidence is at –39%. “The latest –39 reading is identical to last month but well above the –58 score last June amid high gas prices and the...

Businesses are likely to sweat device assets for longer this year as they spend conservatively in a weakening economy, and this along with shrinking demand from consumers is leaving manufacturers in a tight spot. Gartner forecasts a perfect storm with fortunes declining for shipments of PCs, tablets and mobile phones 4.4 percent year-on-year in 2023 to 1.74 billion units. If accurate, that's just slightly more than 287 million computers, down 6.8 percent, some 2.9 percent fewer tablets to almost 133 million and 1.339 billion phones, down 4 percent. This is against a backdrop of a 36 percent revenue decline for...

Nationally, it takes nearly four full-time minimum wage workers to reasonably afford a two-bedroom rental. Affordability for minimum wage workers is tightest in Austin. There would need to be over five full-time minimum wage workers to afford a two-bedroom rental in Austin. In cities with a $7.25 an hour minimum wage, an average of over 3.5 full-time workers are needed to make the typical two-bedroom rental affordable.In cities with minimum wages set higher than that, an average of 2.5 full-time minimum wage workers are needed to make the typical two-bedroom rental affordable, despite many of these cities having higher-than-average rents....

The Case-Shiller index is out for November 2022. Too bad it is January 31, 2023. Call it “Happenings 2 Months Time Ago.” On a year-over-year (YoY) basis, the Case-Shiller National home price index slowed to 6.77%. On a month-over-month (MoM) basis, the CS National index fell -0.54%. That is the 5th straight month of home price declines. Only San Francisco fell on a YoY basis (down -1.6%). Five metro areas were above 10% and they are all in the South. Atlanta, Charlotte. Dallas, Miami and Tampa. On MoM basis, every metro area in the Case-Shiller 20 index saw price declines...

SEOUL -- Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that operating profit plunged in the fourth quarter of last year, as global economic headwinds snuffed out demand for semiconductors and smartphones -- the company's two key revenue sources. The South Korean tech company said that its operating profit came in at 4.3 trillion won ($3.5 billion) for the three months through December, a decline of 69% from the same period the year before and the worst result since the third quarter of 2014. Revenue stood at 70.5 trillion won for the same period, marking a fall of 8%. The figures were in line...

New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman went on a tone-deaf rant against rural Americans who are fed up with Washington, D.C. elites making their lives miserable. Krugman’s Jan. 26 drivel, headlined “Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage,” bemoaned that rural Americans have shifted so far to the right that loyal Democrats supposedly “face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.” Krugman exploited the findings of political scientist Katherine J. Cramer that reportedly tied “rural resentment” to “perceptions that rural areas are ignored by policymakers, don’t get their fair share of resources and are disrespected by...

Utility companies in the U.S. have disconnected customers an estimated 5.7 million times since 2020, according to a new report. The disconnections have come even as those companies have paid billions to shareholders and executives, according to a report published on Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity, BailoutWatch and the Energy and Policy Institute. “No one should ever have to choose between having food on the table and keeping the heat on,” Selah Goodson Bell, a campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, said in a statement. “It’s inexcusable for utility executives and shareholders to profit...

President Trump transmitted a message to congress, warning them not to cut Social Security and Medicare {Direct Rumble Link}. Many politicians and pundits will look at Trump’s position from the perspective of it being good to campaign for older voters, but that’s not the core of his reasoning.In 2016 CTH was the first place to evaluate the totality of President Trump’s economic policies; specifically, as those policies related to the entitlement programs around Social Security and Medicare. We outlined the approach Trump was putting forth and the way he was approaching the issue. In the years that followed, he was...

On Sunday, former Walmart CEO Bill Simon joined "Fox & Friends Weekend" to warn Americans of the detrimental impact corporate layoffs could have on the U.S.'s feeble economy. "It's crazy right now. We're stuck in this loop of, wage inflation, product inflation, and cost inflation. And it's just that cycle keeps going. And I think, unfortunately, an inevitable byproduct of some of the Fed's moves and as the necessary medicine we have to take to kind of cool things down and get the inflation back under control on some of these layoffs that are coming," Simon explained to co-host Will...

Welcome to the wonderful world of Bidenomics, giving the US 40 year highs in inflation leading The Federal Reserve to remove its enormous monetary stimulus (known as “The Punch Bowl.” I previously pointed out that US Real GDP was actually less than 1% year-over-year (YoY) in 2022, hardly a fantastic number given the trillions in Biden/Pelosi/Schumer spending (Omnibus, Infrastructure, etc) and Powell/Fed’s whopping monetary stimulus in 2020. But real disposable income, the amount households have left to spend after adjusting for inflation, had been falling for 7 straight months. In fact, REAL disposable personal income peaked in March 2021, shortly...

Kansas City is a wonderful city. But the KC Fed’s Services Survey is not. In fact, it plunged to -11 for January. Rough start to the new year. The decline in the KC Fed survery mirrors that of other regional Fed indices, indicating a slowdown in the US economy as The Fed withdraws the monetary punch bowl, Despite the hoopla, remember that US Real GDP growth only grew at less than 1% on a year-over-year basis in 2022. Apparently, The Federal Reserve doesn’t have a whole lotta love for middle class America.

There was a hilarious film with Hillary Swank and Aaron Ekhart called “The Core” where earth’s core stops spinning and the earth gets cooked by the Sun’s rediation. Now we learn that the Earth’s inne core has actually stop spinning. This time, however, all that has happened is that Joe Biden is President which is almost as bad, But also related to “The Core” is that the important Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) are out for December along with PCE price deflator numbers. In short, personal income was up 0.2% month-over-month (MoM) in December while personal spending was down -0.2%. REAL...

The December new home sales report is good news and bad news. The good news? US new home sales rose by 2.3% in December from November to 616k units sold SAAR. That is the good news. The bad news? Since December of 2021, new home sales fell -23% year-over-year (YoY). The median price of new home sales rose 7.8% YoY, but the trend as The Fed withdraws monetary stimulus (orange line) is not good. Perhaps there is a communications breakdown between the Biden Administration and The Federal Reserve.

Today’s GDP report from the BEA reminds me of the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is?” Between the massive Fed monetary stimulus since late 2008 (and particularly since Covid in 2020) and all the Federal spending (Covid relief, Inflation reduction, Omnipork spending bill, etc.), US real GDP rose by only 2.9% in Q4 from Q3. But signs of slowing underlying demand mounted as the steepest interest-rate hikes in decades threaten growth this year. Gross domestic product increased at a 2.9% annualized rate in final three months of 2022 after a 3.2% gain in the third quarter, the Commerce...

The average US household is now considered 'rent-burdened' as a record-high number of people are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. According to Moody's Analytics' latest affordability report, the national average rent-to-income (RTI) ratio reached 30 percent for the first time since the company began tracking the data more than 20 years ago.

Three regional Fed reports I like to watch are New York’s Empire State Outlook, Philly Fed’s Outlook and Richmond Fed’s outlook. Today, The Richmond Fed released their manufacturing outlook and … it declined to -11. So the big three are all down (Philly down to -8.9 while NY’s Empire State outlook is down to -32.9. On the Treasury front, the US 10Y-3M yield curve inverted further (a signal of impending recession) just tanked to -126.462 basis points. Winter is coming!

YUMA, Ariz. – A major border city is on the brink of collapse as the migrant surge under President Biden's leadership overloads food banks and hospitals and threatens food security, a Yuma official told Fox News."Policies need to be changed when you see an unprecedented amount of people coming across the border that even supersedes what we saw under any of the other presidents for the past 30 years," Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News. "And they're coming because they said that Biden told them to come, that we have an open border."

Poverty in America is so bad that some people can barely afford their cell phones. In much of the rest of the world, poor people starve to death, or die of what in America are ordinary, survivable diseases or injuries. In America, injustice is so bad that many lawyers appointed by the court cannot get their clients acquitted of the crimes they committed, and must settle for a plea bargain. Elsewhere, to be accused is to be found guilty and imprisoned in hell-hole cellars, innocence being irrelevant to the courts of so-called justice. In the U.S., police sometimes bruise a...

Where Did All the Workers Go?p class="has-drop-cap">In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the US labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people. It’s easy to blame these deaths on Covid-19. The virus is of course one significant cause. But it’s not nearly the only cause, especially among young...