Two new reports came out today indicating that the U.S. economy is weaker and more fragile than we thought. Productivity dropped for the second consecutive quarter, and hiring slowed. It appears that a weak global economy and the United States increasingly onerous regulatory environment is more than offsetting and stimulus from lower oil prices.

National Markets: Since the recession began, we’ve said that residential real estate markets would not recover until the homeownership rate (the percentage of households owning the home they live in) fell to the 64 percent to 65 percent range.  We also said that residential markets would recover when the homeownership rate fell to that range. … Read more

Previously published on July 11, 2014 on NewGeography.com Part two of a two-part report. Read part 1. The problem with analyzing California’s economy — or with assessing its vigor — is that there is not one California economy. Instead, we have a group of regions that will see completely different economic outcomes. Then, those outcomes… Read more

Previously published on July 10, 2014 on NewGeography.com Part one of a two-part report. California is a place of extremes. It has beaches, mountains, valleys and deserts. It has glaciers and, just a few miles away, hot, dry deserts. Some years it doesn’t rain. Some years it rains all winter. Those extremes are part of… Read more

When I worked for the Fed, there were televisions in our building’s gym, and they were always tuned to a financial channel. We joked about how the talking heads had an explanation for every market move. Then one day, someone told the truth. He said something along the lines of “we don’t know why the… Read more

Previously Published in the Orange County Register on May 20. The headline read, “USC steals 2 star brain researchers from UCLA.” But there is much more to the story than what was in the article, which presented the event as a coup in a simple cross-town rivalry between two great universities. The real story is… Read more

Previously published in the Orange County Register Over the past few months I’ve been privileged to hear two members of California’s Black Caucus speak, and I’ve been mightily impressed. Last fall, Sen. Roderick Wright (D-Inglewood) gave two presentations to a Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) economic summit. He painted a portrait of California’s industrial… Read more

Previously published in the Orange County Register Sarah Conly is a Bowdoin College philosophy professor who has recently gained some fame/notoriety/attention with a New York Times piece Three Cheers for the Nanny State (which argues that sometimes government should protect us from ourselves.). That piece has been rebutted by, among others, Jean Yarbrough, another Bowdoin… Read more

Previously published in The City Journal The New York Times loves California. Well, parts of it, anyway. Adam Nagourney, writing a few weeks after voters approved a temporary income- and sales-tax hike, reported that the state’s economic gloom was “starting to lift,” even before the tax had taken effect. Last month, Timothy Egan found “California… Read more

Previously published in the Orange County Register I encountered the phrase “A well-ordered anarchist society” in Michael Huemer’s book The Problem of Political Authority. The phrase grabbed my imagination, and it hasn’t really let it go. For most of us, those words just don’t go together. Our vision of anarchy is chaotic and violent. Huemer,… Read more