Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

UPDATE: Foxconn now says that it will indeed still build a factory, citing a conversation between CEO Terry Gou and Trump (h/t commenter Joel at Angry Bear). This is certainly clear as mud. As others have pointed out, several promised investments from Foxconn have failed to materialize at anywhere near the scale promised, including in Brazil, Pennsylvania, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India. So I am going to remain skeptical on what was a terrible deal in the...

Leading scenes from the employment report not so positive I seem to have been the only person to pick up on the weakness in the underlying leading aspects of last Friday’s jobs report. While the number of job gains was great, and that average wages for non-managerial workers had their second best showing, at 3.4%, of the entire expansion, just behind last month’s 3.5%, the leading aspects of the report, with one exception, were not so positive. Let’s...

The End Of The End Of The Cold War It is a sign of how wacko things hve gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply beeen buried in the news by all the juffing and puffing over Trump’s shutdown ending and these reveleations about VA Governor Northam.  This would be decidion by the US on Feb. 1 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia, followed by Russia’s doing so as well shortly thereafter. ...

January jobs report: a tale of two almost diametrically opposed components HEADLINES: +304,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.9% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.5% from 7.6% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: declined -73,000 from 5.327 million to 5.254 million Part time for economic reasons: rose +490,000 from...

Advance reading of January manufacturing supports further slowdown I have been using an average of the five regional Fed new orders indexes to forecast the direction of the ISM manufacturing new orders index, and indirectly manufacturing production.  Now that all five regional Fed indexes have been reported, here’s a comparison of the regional Fed averages (left) and ISM new orders (right) for all of 2018 plus this month: 2018 JAN   15   65.4 FEB   20...

Foxconn is flailing in Wisconsin (Insert your joke here.)  In what may end up as the biggest economic development failure in U.S. history, Foxconn announced Wednesday that its $10 billion Wisconsin factory will not be a factory. Instead, the company says, it will still create 13,000 jobs, but these will be research jobs rather than manufacturing ones. I’ll believe it when I see it. Accompanied by an almost $4.8 billion subsidy package as estimated...

A note on pending home sales and construction employment The NAR reported that pending home sales declined -2.2% m/m in December. Since this is based on contract signings, it suggests that *existing* home sales will continue to decline for the next month or two. A few commentators have expressed surprise at the negative number, since mortgage rates declined in December. The problem with this reasoning is that mortgage rates only declined to where they...

Flying blind: a note on the long leading forecast for the second half of 2019 We are still “flying blind” on some important economic data, most notably housing permits, starts, and sales, and GDP. As of this morning, neither the Commerce Department nor its Census Bureau have indicated when these reports will be released, although the notice from the former suggests that there will be at least a two week delay. As a result, some important monthly and...

Robert H. Nelson Dies: Religion And Economics Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland Public Policy Department died at age 74 on Dec. 15 while attending a conference in Helsinki, Finland.  He was the leading economist writing about the relationship between religion and economics, notably in three books: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001),...

The Two Percent Solution: Warren and the Stochastic Jubilee Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb.  Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).*  But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee.  What’s the advantage of redistributing the whole thing every 50 years (on average) vs a steady trickle?  A periodic reset would interrupt long...