Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

This is a post I’ve been meaning to put up all week (after all, this week was going to be very slow on data and news, right?). As the expansion gets more and more mature, the *relative* performance of certain measures of improvement become more interesting.  One of those is the comparison between U3 unemployment, and the broader U6 underemployment measure. While we only have about 25 years of data, so caution is warranted, generally speaking,...

(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Drum goes easy on Goldberg It is progress that hack conservatives are bothsidesing now. Jonah Goldberg correctly notes that the problem isn’t just Trump but also broader extreme partizanship. He asserts that both parties are to blame. He seems to know he can’t defend this assertion and declines to try. I think he may be sincere — the extreme partisanship of Republicans means that in the Conservabubble...

With the market falling like it did over the past week it may prove valuable to look at the PE and some other economic reports.  In my PE model the market became overvalued in December and January.  The last observation is at the market close on Thursday, 8 February 2018. the previous two observation are the end of December and January values. Notice that the PE did not rise until December . As of November, 2017 the market PE was still below where it was...

Jobless claims make another record low One reason not to get excited about the last week’s stock market swoon is that it isn’t being confirmed by any other short term leading indicators.  Most significantly, jobless claims. The 4 week moving average of new jobless claims has fallen below 225,000. This is yet another 40 year record low. In fact, with the exception of six weeks in the early 1970s, it’s a new 50 year low. And adjusted for population...

A comment about the markets for the average reader This is a post aimed at the generally Progressive audience of this blog who followed us over from way back in our days at Daily Kos, rather than the financially sophisticated audience who have picked us up since (but of course everybody is welcome to read and appreciate!). Anyway, at times like this over 10 years ago Bonddad used to write posts like “A comment about the markets” for the DK audience,...

Why I’m not impressed by January’s 2.9% YoY wage growth I wanted to follow up on why I dissented Friday from the near-consensus take that workers finally got a nice raise, with many citing hikes in the minimum wage. As you may recall, the YoY% change in the average hourly earnings of all employees rose 2.9% as of January. That was the story in, for example, Marketwatch: Average hourly wages jumped 9 cents, or 0.3%, to $26.74, according to the Bureau of...

End Of The Obama-Yellen Economy For the past year the US has been essentially operating on an Obama-Yellen economy, at least as far as the big macroeconomic policies have been concerned in terms of fiscal and monetary policies.  We saw basically a continuation of what had been seeing in previous years, steady growth with inflation under control.  There was some uptick in wage growth, although that had already started in the previous year.  He has...

January jobs report: good headline growth, mostly negative internals. UPDATE: THE BOSSES GAVE THEMSELVES A RAISE HEADLINES: +200,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.1% from 8.1% to 8.2% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: declined -137,000 from 5.308 million to 5.171 million Part time for economic...

Kind of hard to ignore the blathering of a Republican jerk on the pay increase a school secretary will receive as a result of Trump/Republican tax break. Gosh darn, she can afford a Costco membership now! What an ass . . . He needs to go. Deleted by Ryan afterwards. Secretary was being sarcastic.

David Dayen at The Intercept points us to the latest on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: On Tuesday night, he (Trump)stood before the nation and boasted about the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans. But just hours before his State of the Union address, his lieutenant and handpicked head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, told staff in an email that he was seizing control of the unit responsible for...