Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Catching up: November JOLTS report Let me catch up on some data I didn’t examine last week: the November JOLTS report. It decomposes the jobs numbers into a number of metrics, but is less than 20 years old, so only covers one full business cycle, so is of limited forecasting use. To reiterate, here is the order in which the JOLTS series peaked during the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, from December 2004 through September 2005 Quits peaked next,...

The Democratic Debate in Des Moines: progressive candidates on means testing versus universality Dana Chasin at 2020 Vision does a good job of encapsulating key issuesthat surface in the Democratic debates. Let’s get this out first:  most listeners will admit that the debates seem both too long and too short, as mentioned on Stephen Henderson’s Detroit Today program this Wednesday 1/15 morning.  They are too short, because candidates are interrupted at...

Tyler Cowen today flags a paper by Currie, Kleven, and Zwiers on changing practices in economics, and highlights the following: Panel A illustrates a virtually linear rise in the fraction of papers, in both the NBER and top-five series, which make explicit reference to identification. This fraction has risen from around 4 percent to 50 percent of papers. This caught my eye, because Matt Yglesias at Vox recently highlighted a study claiming to show large...

For MLK Day: unemployment by race In observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, almost all US markets are closed and there is no economic data. So on this day let’s see the extent to which economic opportunity in several neutral metrics has improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Here in unemployment for African Americans (blue) vs. whites (red) since the former began to be measured in 1972 (white unemployment had been...

Housing BOOM! 2 Housing is a very important long leading indicator, and it reflects both the consumer and producer sides of the economy. And this morning, at least in terms of starts, it hit a grand slam. Total housing starts were 1.608 million units annualized, the highest number since the end of 2006. The less volatile and slightly more leading permits declined slightly to 1.416 million units annualized, but the three month average of each made new...

Dan Shaviro (NYU) and Tim Smeeding (WISC) on NPR’s Detroit Today Show For those of you who may not have the opportunity to tune into Stephen Henderson’s radio program Detroit Today on NPR, it might be useful to have a short summary of the January 9 discussion of the “wealth gap” from that program. Background Tax lawyers have traditionally talked of the “tax gap”1  and frequently mentioned the growing “income gap” between the top 1% of the income...

The US-China Nothing Burger Trade Deal There has been much hype about the signing of Phase One (and probably only) US-China trade deal.  However based on a front page story in today’s Washington Post, there is not much there.  The US did not raise tariffs as planned, but tarifsf still remain on two thirds of the sectors that had them, although some were halved.  But numerous US sectors see no change at all and are now viewing the  situation as not...

Real wages declined slightly in Q4 2019; nearly flat since last January In December consumer inflation was +0.2%. Since in last Friday’s jobs report average hourly earnings also increased +0.1%, real average hourly earnings declined slightly: In a longer term perspective, this means that real wages also declined from 97.8% to 97.5% of their all time high in January 1973: The YoY measure of real average wages also declined sharply from +1.6% to...

Scenes from the December jobs report: leading jobs sectors and wages Let’s take a more detailed look at last Friday’s December jobs report. First, as usual for the past few months, let’s look at the more leading jobs sectors. This month, let’s also take a more detailed look at wage growth and why it may have suddenly decelerated. As an initial note, revisions going back to late 2017 are going to be available next month, and preliminarily it was already...

Scenes from the December jobs report: leading jobs sectors and wages Let’s take a more detailed look at last Friday’s December jobs report. First, as usual for the past few months, let’s look at the more leading jobs sectors. This month, let’s also take a more detailed look at wage growth and why it may have suddenly decelerated. As an initial note, revisions going back to late 2017 are going to be available next month, and preliminarily it was already...