The growth rate of the U.S. population has been in a generally downward trend since the post-war baby boom peaked in 1957. Graph 1 shows the YoY percent change in the total population. Graph 1 – U.S Population Growth since 1952 The precipitous growth rate drop through the sixties came to an abrupt halt in […]
Doug Short has an insightful article out today… The Civilian Labor Force, Unemployment Claims and Recession Risk. I want to highlight one graph from that article, where he plots the % ratio of initial unemployment claims to the civilian labor force. He explains the graph…
by Joseph Joyce Affairs, Domestic and Foreign Raghuram Rajan, ex- faculty member of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, ex-head of the research department of the IMF research head, and currently Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (its central bank), set off a storm of comment when he warned of […]
As I said on Facebook, it appears that Tim Armstrong—who got paid $12 million last year alone as CEO of the dead-on-its-feet AOL—is even more of an asshole than anyone previously believed. The pull quote: Until the morning I woke up in labor, every exam indicated that our daughter was perfectly healthy. In fact, had […]
Getting real about Apple’s $100 billion stock buyback. Updated* So I was hearing some where that Apple has a lot of money just burning a hole in it’s pocket. Seems there’s an arson named Carl Icahn trying to really ignite it by using twitter. Apple has implemented a plan to spend $100 billion of it’s […]
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly on ukuleles.
Let’s compare 2012 to 2013. From 4th quarter 2011 to 4thQ-2012, real GDP rose $294 billion. During that time, capital income fell $225 billion, while labor income grew $519 billion. From 4thQ-2012 to 4thQ-2013, real GDP rose $432 billion. During that time, capital income grew $444 billion while labor income fell $12 billion. Granted there […]
Polar Vortex blues
The stock market is rising again on some positive earnings being reported. One reason for the nice earnings could be found in another number… the labor share index. The number for the labor share index, 4th quarter 2013, came out today. It dropped to 95.5… its lowest level since the 1940’s. So if we see […]