faultlinesweekly

The Energy Information Administration's August 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook , released on August 11, puts one number at the centre of this winter's natural gas story. The outlook states that “we expect natural gas inventories to be a record 3,985 billion cubic feet (Bcf) at the end of October 2026,” a figure “which is an increase of 19 Bcf compared with the July STEO and 5% above the five-year average.” Ten years earlier the same commodity produced almost the same reading. On the EIA's weekly Lower 48 working gas series , the last October report of 2016, for the week ending October 28, recorded 3,963 Bcf. The two figures sit 22 Bcf apart, about half a percent. What changed is everything the stock has to be measured against. A stock figure is a numerator. On its own it is a volume, not a condition. This piece takes up a narrow question: when the numerator is flat across a decade and the denominator is not, which denominator should a reader use, and do the pl...

Two Estimates of One Quarter, and a 241 Billion Dollar Gap On August 26, 2026, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published its second estimate of second-quarter output. Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent . Real gross domestic income increased 2.2 percent . The average of the two, which BEA also publishes, increased 1.8 percent . These are not three views of three different things. They are three arithmetic treatments of one quarter. GDP counts what was spent on final output. GDI, in BEA's glossary, is "the costs incurred and the incomes earned in the production of gross domestic product (GDP)" ; BEA's primer on the accounts lists its four components as "compensation of employees," "taxes on production and imports less subsidies," "net operating surplus," and "consumption of fixed capital." In the national accounting framework the two totals are definitionally equal. The difference between...

A Sign Change Is Not a State Change The spread between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury yields stood at +0.50 percentage points on 20 August 2026 — the 10-year at 4.69%, the 2-year at 4.19%, per the Federal Reserve's H.15 release. That is a normally sloped curve, and every monthly average from August 2025 onward is positive as well. Somewhere between April 2024, when the monthly average sat at −0.33 points , and September 2024, when it printed +0.10 , the sign flipped. The narrative attached to that fact runs like this: the inversion was the warning, the un-inversion is the all-clear, and the recession the inversion advertised either arrived quietly or was called off. The problem with that reading is not that it is optimistic. The problem is that it treats one number as one piece of information. The spread is a difference between two independently traded prices, and two prices moving in opposite directions, or in the same direction at different speeds, can produce identical spr...