Recently there has been some discussion of housing in the economy that looked at housing starts versus the long term trend of housing starts and concluded that starts have been so far below trend over the last few years that it should offset the excess housing built before the recession.If the excess housing stock has […]

In August real average hourly earnings fell fell -0.6% as nominal wages fell -0.1% and the CPI rose a stronger than expected 0.4%. On a year-over-year basis real average hourly and weekly earnings are down -2.4%. With real wages falling so steeply no wonder the retail sales report was weaker than expected.I continue to stick […]

Some of you may remember that last cycle I sometimes posted charts showing real exports and imports versus trend to show how trade was doing. It is now over two years since imports and exports bottomed so I thought It was time to update those charts for this cycle. But as I started looking at […]

The current low level of long term interest rates is creating all types of debate about what it is suppose to signify and what investors are discounting. Maybe they are not signaling anything and it is just a return to normal for interest rates. For example, from 1871 to 1960 long Treasuries were below 4% […]

Yesterday in the New York Times Greg Mankiw — a professor of economics at Harvard, an advisor to the governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under president Bush — had a column in which he argued that a cut in […]

One of the current Republican talking point is that a major reason that firms are not hiring is regulatory uncertainty. Of course there is little or no evidence to support this argument and virtually every poll of business and especially small business shows that fear of regulation is a very minor factor in current business […]

With all of the problems I have been having with my internet connection I may have missed it, but the revisions to second quarter productivity did not seem to have been covered very well. But nonfarm productivity growth is slowing sharply. It was actually negative in the first and second quarter —0.6% and -0.7% in […]

In recent years the BLS has developed a new database where they can track the jobs created by an establishment over time. It is called Business Dynamics and you can read about it here. Research using the new database has altered the basic view of where jobs are created. The old view that jobs are […]

Governor Perry of Texas is making the claim that the Texas 2003 tort reform lead to Texas having 20,000 more doctors. I challenge him to document his numbers. Here is the number of doctors registered to practice in Texas before and after the 2003 tort reform. The data is from the official state registry that […]

For years I’ve made it no secret that I thought the US was going to follow Japan into a so called lost decade — of course it’s now more than a decade. With the US stock market now apparently in a free fall I though this chart I’ve been keeping for years would prove of […]