by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 11 – 15 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Noteworthy this week is that mortgage rates have fallen to new all-time lows, and mortgage applications, not coincidentally, have rebounded sharply. This is good news since housing normally leads the way in economic […]
A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal […]
Jobless claims show new damage ongoing, but some damage repaired Now that we have more than one month of data from initial and continuing jobless claims since the coronavirus lockdowns started, we can finally begin to trace whether the economic impacts of the virus are being contained, or are continuing to spread out into […]
Coronavirus dashboard: updating the 52 Petri Dishes of democracy [Note: There is no significant economic data today (Dan here…May 13) Thursday we’ll get initial claims, and on Friday retail sales and industrial production for April, both of which will be important] Here is the update through yesterday (May 12). I will restart giving the daily […]
April deflation follows a typical recessionary pattern This morning’s consumer price index for April gives us our first indication of what the coronavirus recession has done to inflation. Overall consumer prices declined by -0.8% (blue), while consumer prices excluding energy (gas) declined -0.2% (red). Note that in 2015 when gas prices collapsed, prices otherwise continued […]
Reopening Isn’t Reopening—It’s Cutting Off Unemployment Donald Trump, cheering on his “warriors” who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary people can get their jobs and normal lives back. Elitist liberals who work from home and have country […]
If you open it, they still won’t come: restaurant edition In case you haven’t already seen it, here is the OpenTable restaurant reservation data from 3 Confederate States that “reopened” their economy at the end of April: Even though restaurants were open again, reservations were still down over 80% from a year ago.
Testing and the 52 Petri dishes of democracy Since the federal government has abandoned the field, fighting the coronavirus pandemic has been left to the States, territories, and the District of Columbia. This means that there is no unified response and instead there are 52+ individual responses. That is the biggest challenge in tracking the […]
Arthur Dahlberg Pop-Up
What happens when you downsize a large number of people? Well, it depends on the cohort downsized. In this case, Figure 1 That’s correct; Average Hourly Earnings skyrocketed from $28.67 to $30.01: up $1.34. For context, that one-month change matches the average hourly earnings growth from September/October of 2018 until March of this year–18 months […]