Tag Archives: US EConomics

Real income and – especially – spending increase in April, but households are getting much more overextended by NewDealdemocrat In April nominal personal income rose 0.4%, and spending rose 0.9%. March’s spending was revised up from 1.1% to 1.4%. In more good news, the personal consumption deflator, i.e., the relevant measure of inflation, rose only 0.2%, so real income rose 0.2%, and real personal spending rose 0.7%. So far, so good. While...

Boston Public Radio May 19th episode held a discussion of the consequences for the nation when abortion is outlawed. The guest was Jonathan Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT. He was involved with the ACA and the Mass health insurance system. Getting right to it: Based on studies: Women who wanted an abortion but could not get one are more likely to die in child birth, have worse mental health outcomes and a huge increase in...

RJS, MarketWatch 666 Summary: Retail Sales Rose 0.9% in April after March Sales Revised 0.9% Higher Seasonally adjusted retail sales rose 0.9% in April, after retail sales March were revised 0.9% higher, while sales for February were revised a bit lower . . . the Advance Retail Sales Report for April (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that our seasonally adjusted retail and food services sales totaled a record high $677.7 billion...

“Will baby boomers unretire?” (beckershospitalreview.com), Molly Gamble, Becker’s Hospital Review Me: I am seeing this phenomenon happening quite a bit myself with multiple inquiries on job status. Millions of older Americans have returned to work in recent months, with nearly 64 percent of adults between ages 55 and 64 working in April. Essentially this is matching the share working in February 2020 and marking a more complete recovery than...

Housing permits and starts decline slightly, but housing still an economic positive over the next 12 months Housing permits and starts declined, but not by much, in April. Importantly, while typically permits, especially single family permits, lead these series, in the past year there has been a unique divergence between permits and starts due to construction supply shortages.  This has been reflected in the number of housing units...

Economic Policy Institute offers an explanation that our current inflation is different from previous recessions in the US in addition to what NDd and Barkley Rosser offer : Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019....

Industrial production continues to show excellent growth I call industrial production the King of Coincident Indicators, because it speaks volumes about where the economy is at any particular moment, and empirically is the indicator whose peaks and troughs coincide most definitively with NBER recession dates. In April the story told by industrial production continued to be very positive, as total production rose by 1.1%, and manufacturing...

What Is The Worst Part Of The Current Inflation In the US we may have seen the peak of overall inflation, with the annualized CPI rate increasing at 8.3% in April, down from 8.5% in March, the highest rate of increase in 40 years. The issue has become the reported top concern of the US public, according to polling, with the hot job market apparently not offsetting the concerns that have arisen due to the emergence of this high rate of...

No economic data today (May 16) of significance; but tomorrow one of my favorite economic indicators, retail sales, will be reported for April. Since real retail sales lead employment and generally are a short leading indicator for the economy as a whole, I wanted to update on what I see as their importance right now. Here are real retail sales per capita (red) vs. real aggregate payrolls per capita (blue), both normed to 100 as of last...

The Malthusianism Of Benjamin Franklin And The Abortion Issue, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser Thomas Robert Malthus may well have been the least favorite economist of Karl Marx. Basically, Marx did not like him because he saw Malthus as blaming poverty on the poor themselves, their inevitable sinfulness that led them to constantly reproduce themselves excessively when things started to get better, thus leading to population pressing against the means...