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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Outside the Beltway
Sandy Valdivieso and her husband intended to fly from Los Angeles to Dakar, Senegal. They ended up almost 7,000 miles off-course in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
How something this bizarre could happen illustrates how a single mix-up on an airline’s part can cascade into a travel nightmare of epic proportions.
(…)
Valdivieso and her ...
Ezra Klein links to a New York Federal Reserve Bank study that shows that few college graduates are working in a field related to their major:
Here’s some interesting new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. ...
Venezuela seems to be running low on a rather crucial commodity:
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.
Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls ...
France’s economy has entered a recession for the second time in four years, a “double-dip” recession:
France has entered its second recession in four years after the economy shrank by 0.2% in the first quarter of the year, official figures show.
Its ...
The under-35 set are buying cars at a lower rate than they used to. And, no, it’s not because they’re lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. (Although, come to think of it, ...
Writing in the June issue of Reason, Greg Beato argues that the driverless car future envisioned by Google’s ongoing project, and which James Joyner wrote about last month, are a threat to personal privacy:
[W]hen Google presents its vision ...
We’re not seeing much about Greece in the news lately, but that doesn’t mean things are going well there:.
Greek youth unemployment rose above 60 percent for the first time in February, reflecting the pain caused by the ...
It’s been nearly two weeks since a building in Bangladesh housing five separate garment factories collapsed, killing an untold number of workers, and the news just keeps getting worse:
The police said Saturday that the death toll from the collapse of a garment-factory building in Bangladesh had soared past 1,100 ...
John McCain is taking a break from advocating yet another war in the Middle East to make war against cable television companies.
The Hill (“McCain working ...
As expected, the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would permit states to require internet-based businesses to collect sales tax even if they don’t have a physical presence in the state, easily passed the Senate yesterday:
The Senate approved a long-anticipated Internet sales tax proposal on Monday, moving the legislation one step ...