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 […]
Read moreEconomists 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 […]
Read moreAlan 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 […]
Read moreThe 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 […]
Read moreBrian 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 […]
Read moreHow are banks doing? We discuss a few measures. We closed 16 banks in May so far, with 73 so far this year according to the FDIC. There were only 36 bank failures through May […]
Read moreRecent data releases show that Core inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, excluding food and energy, has been falling rapidly for 4 months now. This is despite recently strong real consumption growth and […]
Read moreCalifornia’s April unemployment rate was unchanged from March at 12.6 percent. This was the result of roughly equivalent increases in civilian labor force and employment from March to April. California’s April jobs grew at 1.6 […]
Read moreToday’s decline in market values, and particularly in the financial sector, has to reflect more than new employment data. I’m thinking that market participants are coming to see that the risk of at least one […]
Read moreOregon April non-farm jobs increased 3,900 over March. The April labor market update was posted by the Oregon Employment Department on Tuesday. This is the largest month-on-month increase since October 2007. Using the 3,900 jobs […]
Read moreToday’s report that initial jobless claims unexpectedly “shot up by 25,000 to 471,000 last week” has hit the stock markets hard. I don’t know why the claim is unexpected or why the stock market reacted […]
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