Blog Three-fifths of private renters cannot afford the cost of living The government must unfreeze housing support for private renters By Alex Diner, Sam Tims 10 March 2023 The cost of living crisis means that, for many...

Confirms that demand and not rate of interest affects firms' investment decisions. However, interest rates do affect the economy through mortgage rate and banks' loan policy, that is, through the housing channel (which is accounted for as investment). Raising the interest rate increases the interest rate on mortgages, which decreases the demand for housing over time, i.e., there is lag estimated at about two years. A lot of other demand is also connected to demand for housing, making housing...

The White House is requesting $886.4 billion in discretionary funding for national security in fiscal 2024, with $842 billion from that pot bound for Department of Defense coffers — a 3.2 percent increase over the FY23 enacted level.The administration unveiled its budgetary roadmap today just hours before President Joe Biden was scheduled to touchdown in Philadelphia, Pa., to discuss plans to cut the deficit and fund the federal government next year.…Breaking DefenseWhite House requests $842...

Numbers.Calculated RiskFed's Flow of Funds: Household Net Worth Increased $2.9 Trillion in Q4Bill McBride

This NYT story just dredges up the stories we would read and hear in the fifties and sixties. Popular song when I was hanging around the coffee houses then. No Starbucks then or laptops. If the song was of your ilk. Arriving in record numbers, the children escaping other countries are ending up in jobs violating child labor laws. Their presence can be found in the factories making the products your own and safe children might be eating or wearing....

Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image):Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant delay to its 10-K full-year accounts and warning that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. We will never know whether it could have recovered from the bank run after the failure of FTX. The bank run after the announcement was far, far worse. The exit of its major crypto customers sealed...

In the light of recent debates about whether we are back in the 1970s, where the only ostensible similarity is that inflation has accelerated over the last year or so, I dug into my data archives to remind myself of a few things. One of the problems with dealing with official data is that it gets revised from time to time and time series become discontinuous. So the labour market data for Australia tends to start in February 1978 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics moved to a monthly...

Parts of this Covid Vaccine Story came via the Daily Beast; Just hours after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) swore to question Moderna’s chief executive in a Senate hearing next month about plans to quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine, the company abruptly reversed course, announcing in a statement that the vaccine would remain free to all consumers “regardless of their ability to pay.” The pharmaceutical giant was widely denounced last...

January JOLTS report consistent with a softening, but still very strong, labor market  – by New Deal democrat This morning’s JOLTS report for January, unlike the recent payrolls report, generally showed further softening in the labor market. While hires (red in the graph below, normed to a value of 100 as of February 2020) increased 121,000, quits (gold) declined 207,000, and openings (blue) declined 410,000: The downward trend in quits...