When life gives you lemons you intend to make lemonade, but in days long gone they often had to make due only with what was on hand. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were by pure accident, though I doubt many (or any) were as plain unsanitary as Hennig Brand’s discovery. He had been looking to find gold in urine, [...]
Throughout the 1990’s, calculated productivity in the US skyrocketed in what was taken then as a sign of monetary and economic genius, the “maestro” as it was. By the incomplete measures we have, that certainly seemed to be a plausible case. Starting in 1997, the BLS’s first measure for economic productivity, output per hour, surged. The consequence of that productivity [...]
The payroll report disappointed again, especially since October has in the past marked the end of seasonal weakness. Last year the headline for the Establishment Survey followed the usual summer doldrums: July +277k, Aug +150k, Sept +149k, and October 2015 +295k. This year, the sequence has been (with revisions): July +252k, Aug +176k, Sept +191k, and October 2016 +161k. To [...]
The persistent economic theme of 2014 was that it was better than 2013 or 2012. Therefore, it was assumed, that meant everything had been set right and the temporary disturbances of those prior years were put to the past. It was a fundamental error not just of conflating relative versus actual, but completely ignoring how it was something we had [...]
If we were to accurately describe the economy right now, it would be weak – but not getting weaker. I believe that is the product of the “dollar”, or lack of further “dollar” intrusion. Combined with the usual seasonal changes earlier in the year, the nervous calm of the past almost eight months has had a limited but nonetheless soothing [...]
In the seventeenth episode of the second season of the Comedy Central cartoon South Park, the show introduces one of its longest lasting memes that has survived despite the first airing being nearly twenty years ago, and all the vulgarity and seemingly gratuitous violence in between. Titled Gnomes, we find one of the main character’s underpants (seriously) being stolen by [...]
ADP Research Institute’s National Employment Report has the reputation of being a solid proxy for the BLS’s monthly payroll figures. In my view, that makes it superfluous unless there is some missing trading value for being two days earlier. But if we think of the government’s statistics as of limited use themselves, then there is perhaps the same limited use [...]
Throughout Milton Friedman’s (and Anna Schwartz) seminal book A Monetary History he tries to make the case that suspension of convertibility would have alleviated much of the suffering of the Great Depression. It had in the past worked in that sort of capacity, choking off the suffering of systemic runs just enough so that emotion could die down and cooler [...]
For the second consecutive month I can write that construction spending overall contracted for the first time since 2011. It hasn’t been quite as severe as Personal Income and Spending typically have been, but there has been some noise of revisions in the construction series. The original estimates come out a bit too pessimistic so that by the next month of [...]
A strong cohort of global PMI’s has cheered today pretty much everyone, from economists to the media and anyone else in between. China’s official Manufacturing PMI was calculated at 51.2 in October, the highest level since July 2014, up seemingly significantly from the 49.9 just three months ago this July. In the United States, the ISM Manufacturing rose again to [...]
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