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A Great Job Market, or a Poor One?

By Floyd Norris “We should spend less time talking about race and more time talking about how to get people to work.”  Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, reacting to Donald Trump’s statements on Kamala Harris’s heritage. The Democrats think jobs should be their issue this year.  The flood of new jobs created during the Biden administration...

Soon: More Old Than Young

By Floyd Norris  The aging of America continues, and it seems likely that this year there will be more people over 60 than people under 20 in this country, the first time that has ever happened. As recently as 1980, there were twice as many people under 20 – most of whom were yet to...

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%...