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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Felix Salmon


May 18, 2013, 8:35 pm, 1095216

Jeff Jarvis reprints the clip above, in an article dismissing the privacy concerns surrounding Google Glass. The Victorian attitudes of Newport’s cottagers, he clearly implies, were misguided and misplaced. “Rest assured,” he writes. “ I will ask you whether it’s OK ...


May 17, 2013, 6:35 pm, 1095085

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Why might Yahoo want to buy Tumblr, as AllThingsD reported last ...


May 17, 2013, 2:35 pm, 1094939

Jamie Dimon is wagging his finger from newstands across America this week, above the kind of headline his PR team can only dream of: “DIMON IS FOREVER: Why Jamie Dimon is Wall Street’s Indispensable Man”.

The story itself, by Nick ...


May 16, 2013, 6:35 pm, 1094444

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Today something strange happened: a dreary, easily overlooked vote at the ...


May 15, 2013, 8:35 pm, 1093790

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Europe is in the midst of its longest recession since ...


May 15, 2013, 4:35 pm, 1093645

Ezra Klein has a good summary of the latest CBO budget projections, which show that the national debt really isn’t going to be a problem at any point in the foreseeable future. The deficit isn’t going away, of ...


May 14, 2013, 8:35 pm, 1093113

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No CEO relishes being on the receiving end of a Dan ...


May 14, 2013, 4:35 pm, 1092972

All social networks are based on a cognitive con. No one likes to give out valuable personal information to some huge corporate entity, so the trick is to make people feel as though they have some kind of control or ownership, even when they don’t. Most of Facebook’s privacy controversies ...


May 14, 2013, 12:35 pm, 1092809

Dan Primack is excited about a new bill which would give small-cap companies the option to have their stocks be quoted at 5-cent or 10-cent increments rather than the standard one-cent gap. He explains:

Small-cap stocks are trapped in a cycle of arrested development. They are small, so they ...


May 13, 2013, 8:35 pm, 1092443

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Two of the world’s largest retailers say they have a plan ...