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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May 17, 2013, 10:44 am, 1094794
According to data released yesterday by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Consumer Price Index fell in April at an annual rate of -4.35 percent. It was the second consecutive monthly decrease and the fastest rate of decrease since late 2008, when the economy was ...
May 16, 2013, 2:44 pm, 1094286
The latest data from Eurostat shows that fewer than half of the eurozone’s economies are now growing. Real GDP in the EZ as a whole was 0.4 percent lower in the first quarter of 2013 than a year earlier. The worst news came from the bloc’s biggest ...
May 9, 2013, 8:44 pm, 1090652
The energy policy topic of the week is whether to export more of America’s newly abundant natural gas. Like any good card-carrying economist, my instincts favor free trade. Other things being equal, that makes me pro-export. Still, shouldn’t we listen to what the other side has ...
May 3, 2013, 2:44 pm, 1087070
The report on the U.S. employment situation for April released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics contained some good news, with the unemployment rate falling to 7.5 percent, its lowest since late 2008. Payroll jobs rose by a better than expected 165,000, and upward revisions to previous months made ...
April 29, 2013, 10:44 am, 1083978
One of the most controversial elements of President Obama’s 2014 budget is the proposal to reduce future cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits by changing the inflation index. The Social Security Administration now bases inflation adjustments to on the consumer price index for urban wage earners ...
April 26, 2013, 2:44 pm, 1083124
US GDP growth accelerated from a crawl to a walk in the first quarter of 2013, according to the
advance estimate issued today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The reported annual growth rate of 2.5 percent was just a bit faster than the average rate during ...
April 16, 2013, 8:44 pm, 1077545
The US Consumer Price Index fell in March at an annual rate of -2.14 percent. The decrease reversed a sharp upward spike in February, when the annualized inflation rate rose to over 8 percent. Almost all of the volatility in recent months has been due to ups and downs in ...
April 15, 2013, 10:44 am, 1076534
Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Much the same is true of economies. Maybe that was what EU Commission President Jose Barosso had in mind when he said recently that, “it is a completely ...
April 11, 2013, 2:44 pm, 1074955
The White House has officially unveiled its budget for fiscal year 2014. I hope to have a chance to look at some of the numbers and programs in depth over the coming weeks, but the
overview alone confirms what many leaks have suggested, namely, that this is ...
April 5, 2013, 2:44 pm, 1072419
The U.S. economy created a disappointing 88,000 payroll jobs in March, according to today’s report from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was down sharply from the 268,000 gain in February. The unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent, a new low for the recovery, but even ...
