Meanwhile, Saudis Stuck On Oil Thanks To MbS Crackdown Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has a plan to get Saudi Arabia off oil, with an immediate push to create 1.2 million private sector jobs by 2020. However, as Juan Cole reports, his political crackdown last year in which over 300 people were tossed in […]
Economic Policy Institute answers two laymen questions on wage stagnation: Why is wage growth so slow? It’s not because low-wage jobs are being added disproportionately: One explanation worth looking into is whether today’s low wage growth is due to a composition effect—i.e. low-wage jobs being added faster than middle- and/or high-wage jobs and, as a […]
The US is not in an economic Boom: midyear udpate At the beginning of this year I asked: Is the US economy going to enter a Boom in 2018? To recap, there is no standard definition of a Boom. But in my lifetime there have been two occasions when the “good times” feeling was palpable, […]
US layoff rate at all time lows I don’t write about new jobless claims much anymore, mainly because it has been boringly good for a few years (outside of hurricane disruptions!). But there are times like this week when I am particularly thankful that I am concentrating on the one thing – the economy – […]
Trump Tariffs Hit Largest US Aluminum Company, ALCOA In the history of antitrust law, one of the most important rulings by the US Supreme Court came in 1945, when the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), long based in Pittsburgh with heavy Mellon family ownership, was ordered broken up for being a monopoly, following a ruling […]
by Joseph Joyce Can Globalization Be Reversed? The wide-scale imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration is part of a larger effort to undo the expansion of markets around the globe and ensure that the goods consumed in the U.S. will be produced here. Will it be successful? And what would a world that represented […]
Is Trump Bailing Out Soybean Farmers Or Not? Chinese tariffs on US soybean exports have now kicked in, with China half the US soybean market, and exports much more important for soybeans than for corn, with the US producing half the world’s corn, but exporting less of it than soybeans. Upshot is that while soybean […]
Real average and aggregate wages: July 2018 update As we close out this week devoted to jobs and wages, with the consumer price index having been reported yesterday, let’s take a look at real wages. By now you’ve probably read elsewhere that YoY wages for average workers actually declined slightly (-0.1%): But the flatness goes […]
A (mainly) business cycle explanation for this year’s better jobs growth The pace of job creation declined from averaging over 200,000 a month between Q2 2014 through Q2 2015 to 180,000 or less during most of 2017. This year, it has picked up noticeably to over 200,000 per month again: Why? A basic analysis of […]
A business cycle theory of labor force participation and wage growth I’ve devoted a lot of time and thought, and typed a lot of pixels of commentary, about wage growth in the last few years. Some of it has panned out: based on past expansions,I expected YoY wage growth to bottom consistent with an unemployment […]