Prime age employment participation and wages: not so clear a relationship In the last couple of months variations of the same graph which is supposed to “solve” the wage conundrum have been going around. I saw another version this weekend: Easy to see, there is what looks like a nice, nearly linear relationship between the […]
Children make the bestest hostages Criticisms of Trump in the business press are especially instructive, because they have no obvious partisan motivation. So Josh Barro’s article at Business Insider this morning, castigating his “bully-and-threaten approach to dealmaking,” is particularly noteworthy. He writes: Donald Trump has a negotiating tactic he really likes: Threaten to do something someone else […]
May industrial production: meh Industrial production is the ultimate coincident indicator. It is almost invariably the number that determines economic peaks and troughs. In May it declined -0.1%. While that obviously isn’t a positive, it does nothing to suggest any sort of change of trend: and is in line with any number of similar monthly […]
May retail sales come in strong Real retail sales for May came in strong, up +0.6% just in the month: As the graph shows, this is on trend for the entirety of this expansion, and is also a new high, surpassing that of last winter. Per capita real retail sales also made a new high, […]
Chewing over the message of online job postings Here’s an interesting graph I came across yesterday. It’s from the Conference Board. What it does is track the number of job postings online, and breaks them down between first postings and repeat postings: Let me say first of all that it is of limited use. The […]
Gas- and housing-powered inflation mean real wages are going nowhere This morning consumer price inflation for May was reported at +0.2%. YoY inflation was 2.8%. This is tied for the highest in six years (blue): The cause of the increase was primarily twofold — and neither one reflective of wage inflation. First, gas prices have […]
Update: wholesalers’ sales and inventories — it’s all good Another slow start to the data this week, so let’s take a look at relationship I haven’t updated in awhile. Total sales in the economy are broken up into three categories: manufacturers’, wholesalers’, and retailers’. We’ll get retail sales, the biggest component of the three, later […]
The disastrous German Emperor who was a doppelganger to Donald Trump: Kaiser Wilhelm You know the drill. It’s Sunday, so I write about whatever else is on my mind. I am presently reading Miranda Carter’s “George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm,” her 2009 biography of the three grandchildren of Queen Victoria who were respectively, the King of […]
Brief JOLTS update I’m still traveling, so this will be a quick update. In re yesterday’s JOLTS report (June 7), the main take seems to be that job openings were higher than the total number of unemployed, so presumably they could all be hired and we’d have actual full employment next month, right? I don’t […]
Wage growth: is the dam finally breaking? [Apologies for the light posting: I’ve been traveling, and there isn’t a lot of news this week.] A couple of months ago I wrote that raising wages may have become a “taboo,” i.e., that in some cases employers may be refusing to raising wages, even though it may be […]