I decided to look at the Scott Sumner blog post that Mike wrote a couple of days ago and again today. The objective of the Sumner post was to disagree with Paul Krugman and others about a break in trend in US economic growth because of the Reagan revolution. But rather than look directly at […]
It is nice to finally report that the employment report was encouraging as nonfarm payrolls rose some 290,000 in April. Even if the 66,000 temporary government employment for the census are excluded the job gains were significant.Even the increase in the unemployment rate to 9.9% was actually a positive as it largely reflected individuals who […]
In all the discussions of the real GDP release I did not see this comparison, and I thought it should be made. So far real GDP has increased 2.7% as compared to an average of 4.3% in recoveries since 1950. The range is from a high of 6.8% in 1958 to a low of 1.5% […]
I have reported on this in previous years, but in the first quarter the increase in the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) core CPI was the smallest increase since the early 1960s. Moreover, the 2010 increase was only 0.5%, or less than half the average increase of 1.2% from 2000 to 2009.Why is this important? In […]
March industrial production only rose 0.1%. But this is a very misleading headline asmanufacturing output rose 0.9%. The difference was a 6.4% drop in output of utilities.The decline in utilities largely reflects the March rise in temperatures and fall in heating days as the weather returned to normal after the severe snow storms of February. […]
Capitalists sure seem to prefer Obama to Bush.
Remember the old sailing ships movies with the tall ship stuck in the doldrums and the crew all out in the long boats pulling the ship behind them in the tropical heat. Well,sometimes these employment reports make me feel like one of those crewmen. Yes, the employment situation has quit deteriorating, and there are encouraging […]
I have been asked to repeat some of my past post on the stock market. In particular they wanted to see this long term chart of the S&P 500 price/earnings ratio. Until the 1990s bull market a PE of over 20 on trailing earnings was always a signal of an impending bear market as a […]
Recently the Wall Street Journal editorial page and numerous conservative/libertarian bloggers have shown charts comparing the last few years spike in the teen age ( 16-19 year olds) unemployment rate with the rise in the minimum wage in an attempt to blame rising teen unemployment in 2008 and 2009 to the minimum wage hike. But […]
The Fed of San Francisco just published a note on Okun’s Law and the Unemployment Surprise of 2009. In the paper they conclude that strong productivity was the main reason employment growth was weaker than the traditional relationship that Okun’s law implied. Of course, we at Angry Bear have long known this. I have published […]