Tag Archives: US EConomics

November construction spending confirms building surge One of my consistent themes in the past few months has been how the housing market is priming the economy for strong growth in 2021 as soon as the pandemic is brought under control. In that vein, November construction spending surged, confirming what we have already been seeing in housing permits and starts. First of all, here are both total and residential construction spending for the...

Even More Questions What is capital?What power does capital have when invested in machinery, lands, agricultural improvements, etc.?What happens to individuals when they have experienced the accumulative power of money?

Final jobless claims of 2020 continue to show a lack of progress New jobless claims declined for the second week in a row this week, but are still significantly above their recent pandemic lows, while continuing claims, seasonally adjusted, once again made a new pandemic low. There is a sizable but by no means certain likelihood that December’s jobs number will be negative.On a unadjusted basis, new jobless claims declined by 31,736 to...

The Four big coincident indicators as of the end of 2020 All of the important economic data for 2020 has already been released. In this final week only November house prices and one last week of jobless claims remain. So this is a good time to take a look at the current state of the economy as it has unfolded in this pandemic year. The 4 most important components in the NBER’s toolkit for calling recessions and expansions are real sales,...

Jobless claims continue to show a sideways to an upward trend New jobless claims declined this week, but are still significantly above their recent pandemic lows, while continuing claims, seasonally adjusted, made a new pandemic low. The downward trend in claims has clearly ended for now, although whether the current trend is sideways or upward remains unclear. In particular, there is a sizable but by no means certain likelihood that...

Bubble Bubble Toil And Trouble?  Or maybe not. So recently there has been a lot of buzz that we may be seeing a variety of speculative bubbles in the US and indeed world economy.  Many asset markets have risen in the last few months, with several of them either reaching new highs or getting close to doing so, with some of them rising very sharply quite recently, with all of this making many eyebrows rise to noticeable degrees and mumble about...

The 2004-2020 political red/blue shift: the intersection of geography, the economy, and ethnic migration It’s a very slow, holiday-shortened economic week. We’ll get new home sales, plus personal income and spending Wednesday, and jobless claims as usual Thursday. In the meantime, here is something I found revealing. It’s a map, created by Nathan Jordan,  a college student from Alabama (I think), showing the county-level change in Presidential...

Housing permits and starts for November: yet more evidence of an economy primed for takeoff in 2021 If there was bad news yesterday in the further increase of initial jobless claims, there was also good news in the 10+ year highs in new housing permits. Here’s the graph of permits (blue), single-family permits (red, right scale), and housing starts (green): Not only total permits but also the much less noisy single-family permits made...

JOLTS report for October: similar to previous 2 recoveries, but a decline in actual hiring may be a warning This morning’s JOLTS report for October showed a jobs market recovery that, for one month at least, paused. Openings and quits were up (good), but layoffs and discharges were also up (bad) while hires were down (bad). While the JOLTS data is a deep dive into the dynamics of the labor market, since it only dates from 2001, there are only...

Four measures of labor market losses in the pandemic Below is a graph of 4 ways of measuring the downturn in the labor market due to the pandemic:1. Payrolls (blue) – this is the headline jobs number from the establishment survey2. Civilian employment (green) – this is the equivalent number from the household survey.3. Aggregate hours worked (red) – tracks hours rather than jobs.4. Aggregate payrolls (gold) – tracks total payrolls rather than...