YouTube video by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

YouTube video by Mr. Newberger's AI Funnies

YouTube video by The Daily Show

YouTube video by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

We are indeed still evolving, though it can be hard to tell because it happens over generations and often involves things you can’t see, such as what foods different people are able to digest.

Attacks on the infrastructure of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), reduced export flows, and volatility in commodity markets are generating serious

Scientific publications based on use of The vOICe sensory substitution device for the blind.

President Donald Trump said he'll release the results of his MRI test that he received in October. The White House has declined to detail why Trump had an MRI during his physical in October or on what part of his body. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said that the president received “advanced imaging” at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “as part of his routine physical examination” and that the results showed Trump remains in “exceptional physical health.”

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the sum of all incomes distributed in a year, including disposable personal income (DPI). So, GDP and DPI are positively correlated. That is, they generally move in the same direction and follow each other closely. Our FRED graph above shows this correlation, with one striking deviation at the point of the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s behind this deviation? A third measure, personal current transfer receipts, can help explain. The US government increased transfers to households in such large proportions during the pandemic that DPI growth actually increased even though GDP growth decreased. **GDP and DPI** Prior to 2020, GDP and DPI show a clear positive correlation. During recessions (shaded areas in the graph), the growth rates of GDP and DPI decreased. The correlation also holds outside recessions: During the recoveries after the 1981-82 and 2007-09 recessions, the growth rates of both GDP and DPI increased. From 2020 to 2023, however, the two series behave quite differently: GDP’s growth rate decreased while DPI’s growth rate increased. **DPI and Transfers** Although GDP and DPI are closely related, there’s a difference between them: DPI includes _government transfers_ to individuals, which is captured by the thin red line in the graph. And it’s these transfers that explain the change in the behavior of GDP and DPI in 2020. Our second FRED graph, above, zooms in on the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US government sent transfer payments to households to alleviate the severity of the crisis. In the second quarter of 2020, transfers increased substantially and so did personal disposable income, despite the fact that GDP growth had gone negative. The growth rates of transfers and PDI then generally declined and went negative in the first quarter of 2022, despite the fact that GDP growth had been positive. By 2024, the rates were aligned once again. **Why was 2020-23** **so different**? The US government has increased transfers to households before to alleviate the severity of crises. For example, the first graph shows an increase in transfers during the 2007-09 recession. So why did DPI growth actually increase during the COVID-related recession, but in no other recession? The increase in transfers in 2008 was only 25%, compared with 75% in 2020 and 89% in 2021. Those are proportions not seen before. **How these graphs were created** : Search FRED for and select “GDP.” Click on “Edit Graph,” open the “Add Line” tab, and search for and select “DPI.” Add another line search for “PCTR.” Open the “Edit Lines” tab and choose quarterly frequency and “Percent Change from Year Ago” units for each line. From the “Format” tab, choose the right axis for the third line (PCTR). For the second graph, start the sample period in 2020 Q1. Suggested by Guillaume Vandenbroucke.

Two new studies dig into the long, curving path that cats took toward domestication

A very clear slowdown. (See China's manufacturing PMI heads south) Europe is (more or less) still recovering, though I would not describe it as a runaway boom. But the US is sliding. Plus, China's slowdown is forcing the country to export deflation as her industry tries to survive the domestic crunch. _Quelle pagaille_ ! Trump's tariff tango is endangering the world economy. The world's two largest economies are at best stagnating. And the trends don't look good. [Technical note: Most Chinese economic time series are affected by the peripatetic Chinese New Year, which can be in January or February. The NBS (National Bureau of Statistics) often does not publish data for January and February, or publishes an average for the two months. Seasonally adjusting these time series is difficult. This is complicated further by China's publishing industrial production as a year-on-year change, not as an index. Estimating an index was made more tricky by successive Covid lockdowns. I have found that my seasonal adjustment program was not completely removing seasonality because of these problems. So I have adjusted somewhat the method of calculation for Chinese IP, by seasonally adjusting my estimated IP index _before_ and _after_ covid separately. In addition, I have fitted a centred 12-month moving average to the resulting time series. By definition, a 12-month moving average contains no seasonality. The rate of change I show is calculated from the _average_ of my seasonally adjusted index _and_ the 12-month centred moving average. I hope this still leaves enough variation to detect change in business cycle trends, without being misled by spurious seasonality.]

From the annals of “Research it must have been fun to do” - getting people drunk to study the benefits group decision-making.

Showing just how pernicious the effect of Trump's tariff tango is, China's manufacturing is suffering at pretty much the same time as the US's is also sliding. A triumph. The chart shows the average of S&P Global's and the official NBS manufacturing PMIs, extreme-adjusted, and smoothed using a 3-month centred moving average. During and just after Covid, it became important to watch services. In a normal business cycle, it's manufacturing and construction which drive the cycle, because of the inventory (stock) problem. Services, on the other hand, tend to fluctuate much less over the cycle, so the aberration of big swings during and after Covid is probably over, and manufacturing is once again important. (Though, to be fair, in the US, confidence is so damaged that services may still be affected.) It remains to be seen whether manufacturing drags down services and with it GDP, globally, but that has to be a big risk.