11 years after the huge financial rescue operation, procrastinators look at the cost to the Treasury. The numbers are gigantic. Also the cost was negative. Saving the financial system and preventing a second great depression was, I think, the most profitable trade in human history by far. Crude accounting suggests this, but there are two […]
The US economy did not boom in 2018 At the beginning of each year, I try to identify economic series that I think will be most important in the next 12 months. This year I asked: Is the US economy going to enter a Boom in 2018? There is no standard definition of a Boom. But […]
by New Deal democrat The Transportation Slowdown Well over 100 years ago, Charles Dow (he of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) posited a theory that industrial and transportation stock prices should move in tandem. Why? Because everything that factories produced had to be transported to market for delivery. So it is of interest that FedEx said […]
Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”. Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and […]
Trump is blaming the Fed for the recent poor stock market performance. For once, he may be right. The recent market plunge took the stock market PE from the top of my fair value band through the bottom. The last observation is the 14 December close. The fitted PE has is a function of both […]
Rah Rah Economics Greg Mankiw read Trumponics by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore so we don’t have to: When economists write, they can decide among three possible voices to convey their message. The choice is crucial, because it affects how readers receive their work. The first voice might be called the textbook authority. Here, economists act as ambassadors […]
Real retail sales very positive; industrial production decent Real retail sales for November, together with the revisions for October, were very positive. While November sales, both nominally and adjusted for inflation, increased +0.2%, October sales were revised upward to a nominal +1.1%. On an inflation adjusted basis, that translates to +0.8%. As a result, as […]
A note on initial jobless claims Initial jobless claims for last week were reported at 206,000 this morning. That is one of the lowest weekly readings during this expansion.More significantly, the 4 week moving average is back below 10% off its low, within the range of typical noise: And it is down -4.6% YoY, which […]
Real wage growth: November 2018 update Now that November inflation has been reported (as unchanged), let’s update what that means for real wages. Nominally, wages for nonsupervisory workers grew +0.3% in November. With inflation flat, that means real wages also grew +0.3%: Even so, although they are at a new 40 year high, real hourly […]
The October JOLTS report: very good employment market continues, just below best levels Monday’s JOLTS report for October was, surprisingly, a little weaker than the employment report from one month ago, that I described at the time as perhaps the best in the entire expansion. But this is a relative statement; basically, most of the […]