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 […]


Why Don’t Americans Believe Inflation Is Coming Down? Because (Most) Prices Aren’t

To an economist looking at the government CPI report that came out Tuesday, it is clear that inflation is receding. Over the past 12 months, the overall CPI is up 3.2%, far below the peak annual rate of 9.1% seen in the summer of 2022.  The co-called “core” rate, which excludes  volatile food and energy […]


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% […]