According to the BLS, this has been the best jobs market in decades going back over a year now. After revisions, you can extend that narrative even into 2013 where it seems like QE3 and QE4 had a major impact on employment. That was the reason that Ben Bernanke appealed so curiously direct toward the unemployment rate in his defense [...]
Japan continues to provide the best refutation of monetary policy as anything other than destructive. With its economy stripped bare of dynamic essentials after thirty years of the Bank of Japan’s “lead”, marginal changes are left as remnants of nothing more than monetary transmission. In the space of QQE, that has used up and destroyed what was left of Japan’s [...]
Despite all evidence to the contrary, an imbalanced ledger of data that grows more imbalanced by the month, commentary continues to describe QE as pro-growth stimulus. As usual, the purest form of rebuke to that sentiment can be found in Japan where QQE has performed a global service just not in the way its theorists and practitioners had envisioned. The [...]
At the same time the Bank of Japan cut its outlook for “inflation” last month, seriously violating the standard set at the beginning of QQE to meet its target within 2-years, they also raised their growth predictions for the coming fiscal year (starting in April). Nobody seems to have appreciated the irony of that since almost all of the increase [...]
When QQE was first officially introduced, I produced what I thought would be a “template” for the trajectory of the Japanese economy. On a strictly reasoned basis, without any forward calculations or regressions, the Japanese, and Bank of Japan in particular, were making a choice with what I thought was very little chance of ultimate success. You can understand, somewhat, [...]
The BLS updated its figures for economic and labor productivity, including the revisions for the first quarter. As it stood prior, the calculation for productivity was among the worst of the past four decades. Given that GDP was already revised lower in the interim, that meant that productivity estimates were going be also sent further downward. Since productivity is a [...]
Even though this was released last week, I place a great deal of importance on earned income as an economic indicator so I wanted to mention it anyway. A healthy economy will produce healthy wage gains because work is the basic exchange that creates wealth. Actual, productive wealth is the foundation for long-term economic expansion, of the sustainable kind, so [...]
The nominal changes in average pay in the past few months, and really going back to October 2012, are not really consistent with the orthodox idea of a reduction in “slack” in the labor market. By that I mean wage growth has been lagging at the same time the mainstream payroll indication has moved upward. It is certainly possible for [...]
There is very little that needs to be said about the April estimates for Japanese wages. The prolonged agony was extended yet again despite the purported “surge” in the Japanese economy. What the latest figures show is exactly what I suspected when the spending data first came out – that the Japanese are so pessimistic about their wage situation they [...]
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