One of the more compelling aspects of the last LABOR SHORTAGE!!!!, in an outright contradictory way, was how it was made up of entirely anecdotes. Lacking data, especially wage data, the narrative was instead kept up and alive by the media hyping every small creative innovation companies were using if only to avoid having to actually pay their workers and [...]
Forget gazelles, the ongoing post-2008 threat to small and medium-sized businesses had amounted to an unnatural vise squeezing owners and operators in between their persistent inability to access credit and the lack of revenue growth (or even predictability). The biggest businesses thrived, borrowed freely, and then paid shareholders in the form of gross buybacks (a liquidity preference of their own). [...]
Even the feds haven’t been able to keep up. Without the government having taken over student loans in the wake of 2008-09’s Great “Recession”, there’d have been almost no additional consumer credit extended during the decade since. It’s one more facet to the recovery-less recovery; like Japan, a dominant even overbearing government influence that doesn’t stimulate anything but its own [...]
Revolving consumer credit declined again in November 2020, according to data released by the Federal Reserve last week. Though the monthly seasonally-adjusted change was small, it still represents significant uncertainty and material mistrust of the underlying economic condition among a broad section of consumers. Those who are paying down their credit card balances, while avoiding taking on higher revolving debts, [...]
If anything is going to be charged off, it might be student loans. All the rage nowadays, the government, approximately half of it, is busily working out how it “should” be done and by just how much. A matter of economic stimulus, loan cancellation proponents are correct that students have burdened themselves with unprofitable college “education” investments. Without any jobs, [...]
The Department of Labor attached a technical note to its weekly report on unemployment claims. The state of California has announced that it is suspending the processing of initial claims filed by (former) workers in that state. Government officials have decided to pause their efforts for two weeks so as to try and sort out what “might” be widespread fraud.The [...]
It’s incredible, in a way, because right from the start he’s got everything on his side. There are the media write-ups which all say the exact same thing, calling this an exact science being practiced by the wisest, most considerate stewards. The legend we’ve been raised with. Lore and scholarship (I repeat myself). Most of all, everyone. When everyone says [...]
Jobless claims are not a BLS statistic, which is one key reason why we might not expect perfect consistency with the major payroll reports at times. Times like these, in particular. Instead, the numbers for unemployment insurance applications and payments are tracked by the US Employment and Training Administration (both agencies fall within the Department of Labor). And if the [...]
I guess in some ways it’s a race against the clock. What the optimists are really saying is the equivalent of the old eighties neo-Keynesian notion of filling in the troughs. That’s what government spending and monetary “stimulus” intend to accomplish, to limit the downside in a bid to buy time. Time for what? The economy to heal on its [...]
Credit card use entails a degree of risk appreciated at the most basic level. Americans had certainly become more comfortable with debt in all its forms over the many decades since the Great Depression, but the regular employment of revolving credit was perhaps the apex of this transformation. Does any commercial package on TV today not include one or more [...]
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