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 […]

The current low level of long term interest rates is creating all types of debate about what it is suppose to signify and what investors are discounting. Maybe they are not signaling anything and it is just a return to normal for interest rates. For example, from 1871 to 1960 long Treasuries were below 4% […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 6: 1981 – 1993 This post is the sixth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from […]

Yesterday in the New York Times Greg Mankiw — a professor of economics at Harvard, an advisor to the governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under president Bush — had a column in which he argued that a cut in […]

by Mike Kimel Can someone explain to me why people volunteer at for-profit hospitals? I can understand volunteering at a not-for-profit hospital, but how is volunteering at a for-profit hospital different from, say, volunteering at Exxon-Mobil or Wal-Mart?