I won’t be saying anything publicly about this one. (Cue sighs of relief from ignorant economists.) Kid Dynamite will.

by Mike Kimel Following a merger, a few months ago I took a severance package from my most recent employer. Put another way, I became unemployed. I started looking for another job but without much luck. In the last few weeks, I’ve also started doing some consulting work with two clients. Its been sporadic but […]

Health Care Thoughts: Please do everything you can…. …. to keep mom/dad alive. Physicians and nurses often dread these conversations. Any of us who have been on the family side of this know how agonizing it can be. And I know even mentioning this can cause a firestorm. However, there are some unsettling issues raised […]

In August real average hourly earnings fell fell -0.6% as nominal wages fell -0.1% and the CPI rose a stronger than expected 0.4%. On a year-over-year basis real average hourly and weekly earnings are down -2.4%. With real wages falling so steeply no wonder the retail sales report was weaker than expected.I continue to stick […]

by Mike Kimel Speaking Engagement If anyone is in the Akron, Ohio area and has any interest, I will be giving a guest lecture at David Cohen’s American Presidency class on Monday Sept. 19. The class runs from 12:05-12:55 in Leigh Hall 510. I’ll be talking about Presimetrics, the book I co-authored with Michael Kanell. […]

by Rebecca Wilder I present some basic statistics to highlight the problem in Europe. In short, there exists a deleterious positive feedback loop between overly leveraged banks and their sovereigns in key markets. Exhibit 1: European Banks are overly levered. Spanning 2006 through the latest data point, key European banking systems – France, Germany, and […]

Some of you may remember that last cycle I sometimes posted charts showing real exports and imports versus trend to show how trade was doing. It is now over two years since imports and exports bottomed so I thought It was time to update those charts for this cycle. But as I started looking at […]

The Census Bureau has released estimates of poverty in 2010. Coverage focused on the headline poverty rate which is horrible enough. Much worse, 6.7% of people in the USA suffered severe poverty, that is lived in households with income less than half the poverty line. This is the highest severe poverty rate on record (the […]