This is a Big Deal: housing permits and starts now a long leading negative I’ll have more to say next week, but let me just drop this right now: this morning’s housing report was a Big Deal. FRED doesn’t have the graphs yet, but here are the numbers from the Census Bureau cite. Graph of […]
It’s Sunday, so I take a break from nerdy econ analysis and speak my mind. Last November 9 we woke up to a living nightmare. The next four years were bound to be awful. The only question was, how awful? The very tiny silver lining as of now is that, so far, it has been […]
Retail sales disappoint — but don’t hyperventilate about it There certainly is a lot of information to unpack from this morning’s retail sales and inflation reports, and what they mean for wages and jobs. I’ll address them in separate posts. First, retail sales. They certainly were a disappointment, coming in at -0.3% nominally and -0.2% […]
No, record job openings in JOLTS do not mean that everything is Teh Awesome! Once again most of the commentary on yesterday’s JOLTS report for April was that job openings jumped, so everything is Teh Awesome! < Sigh > To recap one more time… In the one and only complete business cycle that we have […]
A Day in the Life of the jobs market, May 2017 Fifty years ago, when I was a little teenybopper, his album came out and blew me away: Why bore you with this ancient Boomer reminiscence? Because the unemployment rate has only been lower than last month’s 4.3% in only six of the last 50 […]
May jobs report: nothing more nor less than a decent late cycle report HEADLINES: +138,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.4% to 4.3% U6 underemployment rate down -0.2% from 8.6% to 8.4% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but […]
Gas prices on verge of turning negative YoY There are two important aspects to the inflation rate right now. One, as Dean Baker reminds us today, is that most of core inflation has been caused by housing, via “owners equivalent rent.” Take that out, and inflation is only 1%: The second important aspect is that […]
A thought for Sunday: no, Trump approval *still* isn’t imploding. BUT … Democrats continue to delude themselves about Presidential approval polls — with one very big possible exception. In the first place, can we all agree that Trump has had a particularly nasty last several weeks? Including firing Comey, blabbing secrets to the Russian ambassador, […]
Of Memorial Day and Confederate statues Memorial Day is a particularly fitting time to write about the issue of Confederate monuments. That’s because Memorial Day originated as a day set aside to honor the Civil War dead, not just those who fought for the Union, but those on both sides, including those who died in […]
Marginalized populations and employment during expansions Dean Baker ran a graph over the weekend showing an apparent conundrum: namely, that in the last several years there has been an increase in the percentage of those employed who only have a high school diploma vs. a slight *decrease* in employment among those with a college degree. […]