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Numbers Don’t Lie? 

By Floyd Norris  The labor market is booming.  The average unemployment rate in 2023 was 3.64%, down a smidgen from the previous year and the lowest for any total year since 1969.  But is that just because fewer people are looking for work, and therefore are not counted as unemployed?    A way to seek that […]

Financial-Stability QE Can Appreciate the Exchange Rate

By Alessandro Rebucci and Sinem Yagmur Toraman Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, CEPR and NBER Johns Hopkins University, Economics Department On Wednesday September 28, 2022 the Bank of England announced a short-term Gilt purchase program to bail out the UK pension system. The 30-year yield tanked, UK pension funds were rescued, and, quite surprisingly, the […]

A Job Boom That Left Many Out

Job growth in the United States was distinctly uneven for decades before the Pandemic hit, a fact that was emphasized this week when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a list of when each county in the United States reached its highest employment, based on data from 1975 to 2020. It showed that only 27% […]

Steeling Ourselves for Less Steel Use in China

 Herbert Stein, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors for R.M. Nixon, reminded his colleagues that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop”. History is littered with speculators who went broke, betting against clearly unsustainable trends but forgetting that forever is a long time.  Which brings us to the Chinese Real […]

Has the US started to import inflation from Asia? by Melih Firat

Over the last 12 months, inflation has increased 5.4 percent in the US. Stoked by a leap for energy prices and a hefty 4.3 percent rise for core inflation. Throughout most of U.S. post-war history core goods price increases, on average rose at a much slower pace than services prices. Not so over the past […]