Economics Roundtable
Calculated Risk
Read the Bill McBride interview.
Jobs
The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
June Payroll Employment
The slowndown in employment growth over the past few months is starting to become more apparent in the graph below.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Focus on the Problem
U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million jobs in February 2001. For April 2012, U.S. payroll employment had reached 133.0 million jobs, marking the third month in a row above the February 2001 level.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
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Midwest Economy
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Robert Solow, an accomplished economist, once said that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”[1] Similarly, the reshoring of manufacturing activities to the U.S. has been highly touted over the past two years, even though the evidence for it has ...
by Norman Wang and Scott Brave
A summary of economic conditions in the Seventh District from the latest release of the Beige Book and from other indicators of regional business activity:
• Overall conditions: Economic activity in the Seventh District expanded at a ...
Bill Testa and Thom Walstrum
A famous quote by a notable economist, Herbert Stein, is that "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
An independent “State Budget Crisis Task Force” recently concluded unambiguously that “The existing trajectory of (Illinois) state spending and taxation cannot be ...
Norman Wang and Scott Brave
In 2011, the Chicago Fed began providing quarterly estimates of annual GSP growth for each of the five states in the Seventh District in its Midwest Economy Index (MEI) releases. In this blog, we present what we’ve forecasted for each state in 2012 along with an ...
Rick Mattoon
Illinois continues to face a bleak fiscal outlook. Despite the sharp increases in Illinois’s personal and corporate income tax rates, the state still faces $10 billion in unpaid bills and an unfunded pension liability approaching $100 billion. To get back to a sustainable fiscal path, Illinois will require significant ...
by Norman Wang and Scott Brave
A summary of economic conditions in the Seventh District from the latest release of the Beige Book and from other indicators of regional business activity:
• Overall conditions: Economic activity in the Seventh District continued to expand ...
New technologies and techniques to extract natural gas and gas liquids, as well as petroleum, from shale rock have greatly altered expectations for North America’s capacity to produce energy products. As a result of innovations such as hydraulic fracturing, some government, industry, and academic observers have predicted that the United ...
By Maude Toussaint-Comeau
Over the past few decades, U.S. immigrant groups have abandoned a longstanding pattern of settling predominantly in major urban areas. Rather, their residential areas have expanded and diversified to rural locales and smaller metropolitan areas, along with the traditional settlement areas in big cities such as New York, ...
by Norman Wang and Scott Brave
A summary of economic conditions in the Seventh District from the latest release of the Beige Book and from other indicators of regional business activity:
• Overall conditions: Economic activity in the Seventh District continued to expand ...
Followers of the Midwest Economy will be interested to learn that my co-workers at the Detroit Branch of the Chicago Fed have launched a blog that focuses on the Michigan Economy. This blog will serve as a portal for our numerous activities concerning Michigan, ranging from economic analysis ...