More interesting information on income inequality CBO released a new issue brief on increasing disparities in life expectancy. Here I provide a brief summary of the brief (yes, I recognize the irony in that phrasing): * Life expectancy has been steadily increasing in the United States for the past several decades. Recent gains in life […]
In a low to moderate inflation world there is a very strong tendency for firms to raise prices once a year. As a consequence over half of the annual increase in the not seasonally adjusted core CPI occurs in the first quarter. It averages 54% in the 1st Q, 9% in the 2nd Q, 25% […]
Maybe if people actually read what rural and/or small town republicans were actually saying to each other the debate about voting against your own interest or being bitter would take a different slant. I have several e-mail expressing what small town southern republicans say to each other that I have decided to post just to […]
… President Bush reiterated yesterday that if Iran continues to help militias in Iraq, “then we’ll deal with them,” saying in an interview with ABC News that “we’re learning more about their habits and learning more about their routes” for infiltrating or sending equipment. But he also reaffirmed that he has no desire to go […]
K. Harris had a nice comment about the direction of causal relationship in my last blog. Care to discuss the direction of cause and effect in this chart of quality spreads and capacity utilization. Is the current quality spread a measure of the bond market forecast of economic activity? END
Surprising insights from the social sciences By Kevin Lewis April 6, 2008 Do conservative values and conservative economics go hand in hand? A sociologist looked at broad surveys of Americans to find out whether conservative Protestants – the 25 percent of the population belonging to churches that emphasize a literal reading of the Bible, personal […]
The NY Times had a very good article on inflationary pressure from Asia this morning. The article was titled Asian Inflation Begins to Sting US Shoppers. It did a very good job of giving information about how inflationary pressures were driving prices higher in Asia and correctlypointed out that it was showing up in US […]
Even with the drop in employment the new data really does not add much new information to what we knew a month ago. Interestingly hours worked rose this month. But the first quarter average is 107.4 as compared to 107.7 last quarter. This gives you about a 1.1% quarterly drop–seasonally adjusted annual rate — for […]
If you look at the data on traffic deaths it is obvious that we are doing something right in the US.As far back as the data goes traffic deaths have been falling at a -3.2% annual rate. But if your source of information was economics you would be hard pressed to know this. It has […]
This mornings Wall Street Journal article on the stock markets lost decade gives me an excuse to publish one of my favorite charts– the really long term history of the stock market PE back to 1871.If you listen to Wall Street strategist they frequently talk about the long term average of the stock market PE […]