“High frequency data”, as some of these data series are known, causes an inordinate problem for those that are unwilling to move outside of monthly changes. These are the kinds of accounts that are “noisy” and can be difficult to handle absent any real context, but that does not stop them for being used persistently to pigeonhole a viewpoint. Last [...]
The BLS updated its figures for economic and labor productivity, including the revisions for the first quarter. As it stood prior, the calculation for productivity was among the worst of the past four decades. Given that GDP was already revised lower in the interim, that meant that productivity estimates were going be also sent further downward. Since productivity is a [...]
Following up on the payroll disparities that were updated on Friday, it is still difficult to be confident that the economy is on any kind of solid ground. For starters, though the Establishment Survey shows 4.4 million new jobs in the 21 months since October 2012, for an average of 207k per month, the companion Household Survey is only at [...]
Gallup’s latest figures on consumer spending in June put to rest any idea of a major surge, completing a picture of the second quarter that is far more tepid than any weather-related symmetry with the first would have you believe. It has been an ongoing theme for several weeks as incoming estimates (aside from sentiment surveys that never mean what [...]
I spend a lot of my time analyzing these various economic accounts with the idea of flawed statistical inference never far out of awareness. The government agencies themselves spend a great deal of their effort in the same way. Ever since these accounts were “converted” to probability models, statistics is an important part of the “reliability” factor that nobody actually [...]
The balance to all the policy of “good feelings” is the actual ability to spend. Orthodox economics resides on the demand side, which explains much of these persistent problems, yet there is a low degree of realization about getting from A to B. As I said earlier, modern central banks are about manipulating expectations, really feelings, in order to control [...]
Not long before he died, Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase penned an article for Harvard Business Review that pretty much summed up the state of 21st century “economics”: The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate…Economists write exclusively for each other giving up the real-world economy as their subject matter. His piece [...]
The term consumer exhaustion can apply to several circumstances, but typically they all relate to exhaustion of resources. Households can appeal to wages, transfers, savings or debt, and usually some combination of the four, to maintain living standards and discretionary budgets. So exhaustion, like that of yesterday’s GDP, could be due to any one segment failing more than the others [...]
The interest in the plight of the Japanese and “their” economy is not just one of morbid curiosity, but of high relevance and perhaps even a glimpse of the future. It is both a cautionary tale about the command economy and, at the same time, a warning about such apathy derived from the failure to demand something different, or even [...]
I suppose there is some cosmic and ultimately cruel irony to the fact that the new release of wage data in Japan happened today, April Fool’s Day. All the hopes that were pinned on last month’s positive reading in scheduled wages, the permanent income component, were flushed down the memory hole of statistical revisions. For a fleeting moment, Abenomics had [...]
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