Many older Americans reacted to the financial crisis of 2008 by deciding not to retire. Some who had retired went back to work if they could do so. And that trend continued for the next decade. Now the question is whether that trend is over – another victim of the pandemic. The proportion of people […]
Author: Floyd Norris
A Lost Four Years, But Better Than Hoover
The United States may be on the verge of an unfortunate accomplishment rarely reached in the last century: a presidential four-year term in which real per capita GDP was lower when the term ended than when it began. The International Monetary Fund estimated this week that the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the United […]
A Tale of Two Sectors
The private sector added jobs in May almost everywhere in the United States. The public sector lost jobs, also almost everywhere. Those two trends seem likely to persist in the months to come, as states continue to allow more businesses to reopen – and as state and local governments see tax revenues remain at depressed […]
Republican View of Economy: Getting Worse, But Still Better than Obama
Just how bad is the economic outlook? These days the answer seems to depend on the politics of the person being asked. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index is released weekly, based on a poll that asks only three questions. Consumers are asked to rate the overall economy, the buying climate and their personal finances as […]
Votes, deaths and layoffs
There are 50 states, but only 13 where the 2016 presidential election was decided by a margin of less than eight percentage points. Six of them went for Hillary Clinton and seven for Donald Trump. It is likely that this year’s election will be largely decided in those states. So how are they faring in […]
Market Volatility
Get ready for another crazy month on Wall Street. Months like March tend to come in pairs, at least as far as volatility goes. Daily moves of 4% or more are usually rare for the S&P 500; there were only ten of them in the entire decade of 2010 through 2019. In March, there were […]
Trump stocks
President Trump has frequently pointed to the performance of the stock market in praising his own performance, although not in the past week when markets worldwide came down with (fears of) the coronavirus. Even at the end of the market’s worst week since 2008, the S&P 500 has still risen at a compound rate of […]