ECONOMICS

By Carolina Worrell of Railway Age

“August was the third straight month in which total year-over-year U.S. rail carloads have fallen,” Association of American Railroads (AAR) Senior Vice President John T. Gray reported on Sept. 6. Total combined U.S. traffic for the first 35 weeks of 2023 was 16,173,208 carloads and intermodal units, a decrease of 4.9% compared to last year.

Gray said that a major reason why is that “other than automotive manufacturing, the industrial (more…)

Authored by MN Gordon via Economic Prism,

Has there ever been a worse time to be a lowly American wage earner?

First, Washington spewed out $6 trillion in printing press money.  This pushed consumer price inflation to a 40 year high.  At the same time, it diluted wages from a standard lager to a pilsner light.

Now, at this very moment, the demand for higher wages through union organization is leading to the mass culling of payrolls.  The higher wages go.  The less (more…)

Authored by Bruce Wilds via the Advancing Time blog,

China's economy is in trouble. After seeing a video claiming much of China's Electric Vehicle industry was built on subsidies that are now gone, I'm forced to ponder the legacy of these policies. It showed a factory in Chongqing, China, where a huge number of clean energy vans sit abandoned, covered in a thick layer of dust. This rendered their original appearances unrecognizable. Recently, aerial footage has also surfaced (more…)