Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

How close are we to “full employment”? As I pointed out Friday, there was a lot of good news underneath the headline jobs gain — primarily in labor force participation and underemployment. So, how close are we to “full employment,” based on the last few expansions? Let’s start with the simple, straightforward unemployment rate of 3.9%. This is already considerably below the best reading of the 2000s expansion, and only 0.1% above the best reading of the...

Real Wages Decline Trump and his allies have been loudly bragging about the second quarterly GDP growth rate of 4.1%.  It is quite possible that a growth rate of this sort may be maintained for another quarter or so, given the large fiscal stimulus put in place at the beginning of the year. How curious it is that that coincided with the peak of the US stock market, at least as measured by the Dow. However, this is seriously overblown for the simplest of...

July jobs report: booming jobs market, and a surge in participation continues to depress wage growth HEADLINES: +157,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.0% to 3.9% U6 underemployment rate down -0.3% from 7.8% to 7.5% (new expansion low) 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:  down -95,000 from 5.258 million to 5.163 million...

Trump’s Illegal Economic Sanctions Against Iran Start Up Today, President Trump’s promised abjuration of President Obama’s hard-negotiated nuclear deal with Iran,the JCPOA, jointly agreed with Russia, China,  UK, France, Germany, the EU, and the Security Council of the United Nations. All parties agree that Iran has held to the agreement, so Trump’s move is completely internationally illegal.  His move is supported by exactly four other nations on the...

By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) Four Definitions of Money. All Correct Money makes the world go round. That may well be true, but money certainly makes the economics world go round. It’s the discipline’s special purview, the numeric linchpin that gives economics its dominant role and voice in our affairs. It’s what makes economics seem so “objective” compared to other social sciences. Given that, it’s remarkable that economists don’t...

Mortgage rates probably have to top 5% to tip housing into a recession-leading downturn I’ve pointed out many times that, generally speaking, mortgage rates lead home sales. It’s not the only thing — demographics certainly plays an important role — but over the long term interest rates have been very important. I have run the graph comparing mortgage rates to housing permits many times. In the graph below, I’m using a slightly different housing metric —...

Mush versus Mush on Climate Change The very long New York Times piece on climate change politics in the 1980s by Nathaniel Rich has attracted a lot of critical commentary—justifiably.  To say that the failure to achieve a political response was due to human nature, a genetic defect that prevents our species from planning ahead, is just lazy and wrong.  Were the scientists, environmentalists and other activists that did want to take action a bunch of...

[embedded content] How to stay awake for economics!

When the second quarter real GDP report was published I saw that trade made a major contribution to growth — exports contributed 1.12 percentage points of the 4.1% real GDP growth.  But that seemed like some sort of fluke produced by unusual conditions rather that what trend growth would generate.  Moreover, the BEA estimate was based on only two months actual data and the other month was a BEA “guesstimates”.  So new data was quite likely to generate...

Click this link. Data For Progress decided to ask people about policy proposals which very serious centrists consider way too far left for America. American voters respond differently. As should already be clear from existing polls (click and search for “fair”), there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. At Data For Progress, they chose to emphasize the positive — four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think...