Tag Archives: Featured Stories

A Day in the Life of the jobs market, May 2017 Fifty years ago, when I was a little teenybopper,  his album came out and blew me away: Why bore you with this ancient Boomer reminiscence? Because the unemployment rate has only been lower than last month’s 4.3% in only six of the last 50 years, and only two of them in the last 46 years: Since February 1970, the only time the unemployment rate has been less than it is now is from 1999 into 2001. That’s not...

by Dale Coberly MAYA MACGUINEAS COMMITTEE FOR A RESPONSIBLE FEDERAL BUDGET (CRFB) TALKS BACKWARDS ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES…NOBODY THE WISER Here is what she said: “and “protecting” Social Security and Medicare, a reassuring political promise that removes over one-third of the budget from consideration.” “trying to square the circle of balancing the budget while taking the largest contributors to spending growth — Social Security and...

Real aggregate wage growth finally overtakes Reagan expansion In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans’ situations have improved during an economic expansion is real aggregate wage growth.  This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for nonsupervisory workers times aggregate hours worked in the economy deflated by the consumer price index This tells us how much more money average Americans are taking home compared with the worst...

Following up on my post from two weeks ago, Immiseration Revisited, I built a spreadsheet replica of the marvelous Chapman diagram. In addition to lines on the page, the replica provides me with tables of numbers that I can add, subtract, multiply and divide in accordance with the conceptual logic of the diagram. The chart below shows the results of some of these calculations. The red curve graphs cumulative gross “output” and green curve subtracts the value...

(Dan here…hat tip NDd for this post.  Very long and well worth reading) By Lambert Strether of Corrente Toward a Jobs Guarantee at the Center for American Progress (!) I had another topic lined up today, but this (hat tip alert reader ChrisAtRU) is so remarkable — and so necessary to frame contextualize immediately — I thought I should bring it your attention, dear readers. The headline is “Toward a Marshall Plan for America,” the authors are a gaggle of CAP...

Top 100 Economics blogs The Angry Bear blog is a very popular multi-author blog. This left-leaning blog provides incisive commentary on U.S./Economics, law and politics.

Via AngryBear Econ facebook page comes Dr. Robert Waldmann’s discussion of costs of healthcare and life expectancy  on Challenging Opinions. (among several others such as supply side economics…click the link above)

I’ve discussed the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Reports before, an excellent source of data for both wealth and wealth inequality. The most recent edition, from November 2016, shows the United States getting wealthier, but steadily more unequal in wealth per adult and dropping from 25th to 27th in median wealth per adult since 2014. Moreover, on a global scale, it reports that the top 1% of wealth holders hold 50.8% of the world’s wealth (Report, p. 18). One...

 by New Deal democrat A quick primer on interest rates and rate hikes With increasing speculation that the Fed will again raise interest rates this month, I thought I would take a look at how long term rates, and the yield curve, react. As most everybody who follows this stuff knows, in the last 60 years the yield curve has always inverted before the onset of a recession — which presumably means that it narrows before it inverts. But *how* does it...

by Joseph Joyce The Emerging Market Economies and the Appreciating Dollar U.S. policymakers are changing gears. First, the Federal Reserve has signaled its intent to raise its policy rate several times this year. Second, some Congressional policymakers are working on a border tax plan that would adversely impact imports. Third, the White House has announced that it intends to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure projects. How all these measures affect the U.S....