Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Scenes from the June employment report As I (and everyone else) wrote on Friday, the establishment portion of the June jobs report was very good. On closer examination, though, the leading components of the report continued to show some weakness. To begin with, for months I’ve been following manufacturing, residential construction, and temporary employment as the leading sectors. As the below graph of the past 18 months shows, all were positive in...

The Expansion Of Assets With Negative Nominal Interest Rates Buried in the Weekend section of the Financial Times is a report that the aggregate value of assets that earn negative nominal yields has substantially expanded since the beginning of 2019 and has reached a new high.  So on January 1, 2019, the value of these assets was at $8.3 trillion.  As of six months later it had reached $13 trillion, a more than 50 percent increase.  There are fewer...

Everybody and their brother has an opinion about the direction of long bond yields so  it should be OK for me to stick my two cents worth in. This chart of the composite of all long bond yields versus the long wave is one I published every month on the back cover of my monthly publication for over 20 years before I retired a couple of years ago.  Basically, I thought of it as a good way  to show that I was a long term bull on interest rates in a way that...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Lower long term interest rates continue to improve the long range forecast, while the short term forecast has deteriorated. As usual, clicking over and reading puts a penny or two in my pocket to help reward me for my efforts.

I am thinking about modern macroeconomic methodology again. I am also thinking about the fresh water school of thought. Also I am thinking about aspirin and smallpox. I am going to attempt a nickle summary of the Lucas critique (really a half penny summary or a 5 Turkish Lira summary). Lucas argued that it was unwise to base policy on models which fit the available data, because parameters can be estimated even if they do not describe causal...

June jobs report: excellent establishment survey, mediocre household survey HEADLINES: +224,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.6% to 3.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.1% from 7.1% to 7.2% Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession   I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown is coming. The following more leading numbers in the report tell us about where...

In which I nitpick Prof. Jared Bernstein about a consumer “economic tailwind Last Friday, following the release of May’s personal income and spending report, Prof. Jared Bernstein, whom I follow religiously, wrote among other things about some economic headwinds and tailwinds, including the following: Finally, my personal favorite tailwind indicator [pointing to the below graph]: the close tracking between aggregate real earnings and consumer spending....

Iran Nuclear Deal: Better Late Than Never? Monday has seen a curious coincidence that I have seen nobody else comment on regarding the  status of the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal.  On the one hand Iran has apparently now officially violated the agreement in terms of the amount of low level enriched uranium it has, going over the allowed limit, although it remains very far from obtaining in nuclear weapons. On the other the EU, more specifically and...

You can not use inflation data like the CPI to compare living cost is one location to another.  So the BEA has constructed a database  of Regional Price Parities  ( RPP) that allow you do do that for all states and the some 383 Standard Metropolitan Areas in the USA. .  I was preparing to show them when BEA published the 2018 data.  But that data willnot be released until next year so I’m going ahead and showing the 2008 to 2017 data. Note, that in the...

Housing: Elizabeth Warren v. John Cochrane Noah Smith has a lot of praise for the economic policy proposals from Elizabeth Warren. I’ll mention only one: With costs for shelter eating a bigger piece of Americans’ paychecks, and local government paralyzed by incumbent homeowners, the country needs a big solution. Warren’s would combine incentives for raising zoning density with increased public construction”. This is interesting in light of John...