A fantastic example of productivity! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9LlLLZwAU

Making comparisons over time of how real income grows is a difficult proposition with many data problems. One recent study was able to show how a current family’s income when they were in their thirties compared to the income of the same individuals parents when the parents were in their thirties. This type of intergenerational […]

Trade and inventories are treated differently in the GDP accounts. All other GDP data is the average of the three months data. But trade and inventories are the change from the end of the quarter to the end of the quarter. This is because we not not directly measure output. Rather, we measure consumption and […]

This is a chart of your data on personal taxes as a share of personal income. See what I mean by how stable it has been until recent years.

This chart was published the Division of Labor Blog and is getting a lot of references in the libertarian blogs.http://divisionoflabour.com/archives/004409.php But it is an example of the danger of a little knowledge. OSHA was created under Nixon as part of his “Simplifying Government Initiative”. The creation of OSHA was just a bureaucratic reorganization that involve […]

The NBER committee that officially determines the dates for recessions has a few favorite, or key indicators that it gives much more weight. One of the indicators is real manufacturing and trade sales. Not many people pay much attention to it because it does not have its own press release and wall street traders do […]

The other big economic report Friday came through late in the afternoon and did not get much attention. But it was also discouraging. Auto sales fell from 16.3 M (SAAR) in December to 15.2 M (SAAR) in January. So we are starting the first quarter with a sharp drop in both employment and demand.

Nothing in the report is encouraging. Moreover, wage growth continues to weaken.

I have a lot of theories about what caused the long wave in interest rates. Most center on inflation, but here is another interesting chart to make you think about it. One of the key relationship is that monetary velocity is inversely related to real interest ratesand that has been true for decades — including […]

Oldvet– very good on the long run bond market. Here is another chart to put that trend in perspective. I suspect that to get back to the solid trend line it will take a Japaneses type depression scenario.