One more point on the hourly compensation estimates as they relate to this supposed labor shortage. As I wrote in examining the Beveridge Curve from a different, and ultimately more consistent, perspective: It just doesn’t work that way. In a real labor shortage, wage gains wouldn’t be modest because they couldn’t be modest. If they are modest, then the shortage [...]
If there is a boom here, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the term itself needs to be clearly defined. The common definition is a broad-based and sustained expansion, one that is beneficial to a wide cross-section of any society experiencing it. Since this is still nominally a capitalist system, eroded as it may be in some parts, “broad” would [...]
According to China’s official PMI’s, those looking for a boom to begin worldwide in 2018 after it failed to materialize in 2017 are still to be disappointed. If there is going to be globally synchronized growth, it will have to happen without China’s participation in it. Of course, things could change next month or the month after, but this idea [...]
You have to go back four years for some honesty. The FOMC in January 2014 could be more forthright simply because the committee’s members believed they wouldn’t ever have to explain themselves. They voted to taper QE at the end of 2013 with the expectation that the economy would perform as their econometric models laid out. Thus, they could say: [...]
It’s interesting, to me anyway, that an image of the Roman goddess Juno remains to this day on the logo of the Bank of England. There are many stories about her role as it relates to money, but what cannot be denied is that the very word itself came to us from her temple. The Latin moneta was derived from [...]
In late January 2012, the FOMC released an official statement confirming to the world what had long been expected. The official goal of monetary policy, or at least one of them, was to achieve price stability being clearly defined as 2% inflation (PCE Deflator). It was part of the ultimate transformation of Federal Reserve policy, from the hidden, intentionally opaque [...]
It used to be a big deal, the kind of move that would itself move markets all over the world. Very quietly, JPY has been trading higher over recent weeks and has reached a level of appreciation we haven’t seen since those rocky days in early September. Only then, a rising yen (falling dollar) was a sign of bad things, [...]
For GDP, one big piece that’s missing, or what’s kept it at a lower rate than in the comparable 2014 period, is inventory. Three and four years ago, American businesses couldn’t get enough. They piled into it at a record pace. The reason they did was almost surely Janet Yellen, or at the very least the mainstream economic projections that [...]
In one of those rare turns, the term “globally synchronized growth” actually means what the words do. It is economic growth that for the first time in ten years has all the major economies of the world participating in it. It’s the kind of big idea that seems like a big thing we all should pay attention to. In The [...]
Of all the moving parts contradicting the narrative of the growing economic boom, it’s incomes that will do it the most disservice. After all, there can be no such thing without them. Until our future robot AI overlords finally descend to either free humanity from labor, or eliminate us altogether, the economy still runs on the basic capitalist premise of [...]
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