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.
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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?
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EconModel
The Economics Roundtable is sponsored by EconModel.
The Classic Economic Models cover micro, macro, and financial markets.
Carpe Diem - AEI (Mark J. Perry)
In the NY Times recently, a San Francisco landlords explains why he’ll leave the apartment in his home vacant, and never rent it out again – thanks to the city’s rent control and anti-landlord housing laws.
San Francisco is going through one of its worst housing ...
The National Association of Home Builders is reporting this week that:
Builder confidence in the market for newly-built single-family homes hit a significant milestone in June, surging eight points to a reading of 52 on the National Association of ...
From the “Difficult Run” blog post “Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance” by Nathaniel Given:
Imagine if grocery shopping worked like health insurance. Let’s call it “food insurance.”
Now let’s imagine what actually shopping for groceries would look like. Theoretically, insurance is about risk management. That’s why you ...
1. Another doctor dumps all health insurance plans, after five years of dealing with the red tape of health insurance companies and the high overhead for the staff he hired just to deal with paperwork. The Wichita family physician switched to a system of charging patients a ...
From my op-ed in today’s Investor’s Business Daily:
Shale production is about to turn the country into a net exporter of natural gas, and oil is being produced at such a clip that crude imports have fallen this year to a 25-year low. Remarkably, this oil and natural ...
North Dakota set another new monthly oil production record at 793,302 barrels per day (bpd) in April according to oil production data released last Friday by North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources (see chart above). For the ninth month in a ...
The excerpt below is from the article “Concepts and Implications of Altruism Bias and Pathological Altruism,” by Barbara Oakley, associate professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Oakland University (Rochester, MI), which was profiled in Saturday’s WSJ by James Taranto (“Pathological Altruism,” defined as ...
At a conference last week called “View from the Pulpit: Faith Leaders and Drug Decriminalization,” held at American Baptist College in Nashville, a group of black pastors and religious leaders gathered to discuss the moral injustice of America’s shameless and failed War on Drugs.
From a
From my op-ed in today’s Detroit News titled “Gas engine stands the test of time“:
The automobile stands as an enduring symbol of mobility and opportunity in America — and of innovation that’s at the core of our nation’s economic strength and ...
Largely because of America’s failed and shameless “War on Plants” (aka the “War on Weeds” and the “War on Drugs”), the US is the world’s No. 1 jailer, with a higher incarceration rate than any other country (note that 47% of all federal prisoners ...