For the second straight quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates US productivity growth was less than 1%. That’s not surprising given the weakening in output as measured by GDP, the data reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Productivity is the bridge between the BLS’s labor numbers and the more general economic assessments of the BEA (Private [...]
Continued from Part 1 What these unusually weak productivity estimates lean toward is, quite simply, the possibility the BLS has been overstating jobs gains for years. In early 2018, there is already the hint of just that problem in a 4.1% unemployment that doesn’t lead to any acceleration in wages and labor income. What it does suggest is that something [...]
Most people have been looking at Jerome Powell’s Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve as continuity, a comprehensive extension of Janet Yellen’s (and therefore Bernanke’s). This would by nature include all the nasty habits Chairman Yellen had picked up during her one term. At the top of that list is the word “transitory”, particularly how it came to be used during [...]
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 [...]
In a report released last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that Multi-Factor Productivity rose in only 21 of the 86 categories of the manufacturing industry in 2015. Unlike labor productivity which is more easily calculated, Multi-Factor Productivity measures attempt to take account of all business inputs (including labor). Capitalism is by its nature the combination of all [...]
As much as even the major labor market statistics have picked up on slowing, they wouldn’t have in the first quarter of this year presented enough of it to keep productivity positive. With a very low level of output, once again, calculated labor productivity was for the fourth time over the last six quarters negative. According to the BEA, total [...]
In addition to all the myriad indications of a serious labor market slowdown last year, despite the fact that the unemployment rate has been 5% or less since September 2015, and in all likelihood was that again in January, there is no indication of any acceleration in wages or earnings. None. The labor market just is not as it is [...]
Productivity in Q4 2016 was estimated to have been 1.29%, suggesting that last quarter was merely bad rather than unusually bad as it had been just before. Productivity during what was the near-recession in the three quarters including and after Q4 2015 was negative in all three. That would suggest, strongly, why labor market statistics have uniformly described a rather [...]
In 1998, Time Magazine asked Paul Krugman to write up a futuristic piece for the publication’s 100th anniversary issue. Time, pardon the pun, has not been kind to a lot of what he said, but in particular his whimsical predictions for the then-newly expanded internet. The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states [...]
According to the BLS’s latest figures, real hourly compensation increased 2.2% Q/Q (annualized rate) in Q3. Wages and earnings are being closely watched, of course, for signs of acceleration due to the so far ethereal full employment level. That idea is taken from the unemployment rate even though, as in November, it has been as much determined by the lack [...]
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