– by New Deal democrat As readers know well, one of my favorite “real life” indicators is real aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls, which measures how much in wages average American workers have to spend each month. When it is growing, economic expansions almost always continue; when it declines by any significant amount, recessions almost always ensue […]

 – by New Deal democrat Today is Presidents’ Day, so there are no official economic data releases; and there will be no significant releases tomorrow either, before a torrent of both timely and delayed data from Wednesday through Friday, including GDP for Q4. In the meantime, because of the January updates for employment and inflation last […]

– by New Deal democrat Now that we have the consumer inflation number for August, let’s take a look at real wages and income for ordinary workers. In the jobs report last Friday, we learned that both average hourly earnings and aggregate payrolls for nonsupervisory workers increased 0.4% in August. Yesterday we learned that consumer inflation […]