Industrial production is clearly slowing as total output and manufacturing output fell 0.2% in September– the difference between total and manufacturing output is utilities and mining and mining includes oil and gas production. The slowdown was widespread as output of oil dirlling and the information technology sectors both fell. About the only increase was an […]

The employment report was weak across the board as the unemployment rate remained at 9.6% as government employment fell -159,000 reflecting both falling temporary Census jobs and loses of some -76,000 local government jobs in both education and noneducation. Private payroll jobs expanded by 64,000– about the same as over the last few months. Hours […]

Despite the point that the first data reported in the monthly personal income report is nominal personal income, it does not get much attention in the press and by bloggers. Weare starting to see a rebound in nominal personal income growth even though it is still quite low by historic norms. The current smoothed growth […]

Labor cost as a share of business output is now at a post WW – II low. and has fallen about eight percentage points since 2000. This would suggest that the weak demand for labor does not stem from high labor cost. Actually since the third quarter of 2000 while labor cost as a share […]

There is still a lot of talk about the bond bubble with so many people expressing their opinions about bond yields being too low. Maybe. But I thought it might be informative to show that my bond valuation model says that bondyields are almost exactly where this “objective” analysis says they should be. Yes, it […]

This is from the Wall Street Journal. The Obama administration has targeted small business with laser-like focus, pushing a $30 billion small-business lending fund in Congress and, later this week, rolling out a tax break allowing businesses to deduct 100% of qualified capital investments. But the chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Businesses […]

The monthly employment report roughly showed the economy to be still stagnated as the trends that have been in place so far this year continued. Private payrolls increased modestly by some 67,000 jobs. But the drop in census temporary employment caused total nonfarm payroll employment to fall 54,000.The year over year gain in jobs as […]

I though a little different perspective on the impact of trade on the real GDP accounts might be interesting. The first chart is of imports market share, or imports as a share of what we purchase in the US. In the second quarter of this year imports market share rebounded to about where it was […]

With the downward revision of second quarter real GDP growth from a 2.4% growth rate reported in the advance report to 1.6% reported in the first revision, real GDP in the first year of recovery now appears to be 3%. As was originally reported this is still stronger than the first year of recovery in […]

Many are talking about the bond market being the latest bubble. But it looks more like the press is just seeing bubbles everywhere. To me a bubble happens when everyone starts believing something that probably is not true. For example in the 1990’s investors started thinking that the long term earnings growth of the S&P […]