the data gave no reason for a giddy attack

California Trade data continue to reveal a strengthening that initially occurred late last year.  First quarter container loadings, inbound plus outbound at Los Angeles and Long Beach Ports, were up 14.6 percent from the prior year. California’s 2010 first-quarter exports were up 44 percent from the prior year, following a 29 percent year-on-year increase in… Read more

Economists agree on relatively few topics when it comes to macroeconomics, but we do have some topics that generate something approaching consensus.  One topic of general agreement among economists is immigration.  Most economist are convinced that immigration is good.  Of course, this is in sharp contrast with popular opinion.  So, we need to keep trying… Read more

Alan Auerbach and William Gale have a paper on future deficits coming out in the National Tax Journal September issue.  They start with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, but point out that the CBO projections require that Congress does something it doesn’t do, nothing.  In the current context, this means letting the Bush tax… Read more

The May labor market data are mostly disappointing, with 411 of the 431 thousand job gains due to temporary Census 2010 staff increases. The raw data indicate that April SAAR job growth was 2.7 percent and May was 4 percent. If we remove the temporary Census workers from the data, then the revised SAAR growth… Read more

Brian Caplan has a nice little model on employment markets that really does explain a lot of what we see: In equilibrium, nice employers hire the rich, and mean employers hire the poor. It makes sense: Nice employers need rich workers they can trust, and poor workers misbehave unless there’s a mean employer on their… Read more