As with Staples, McDonald’s poses the possibility of a competitive aspect to its latest results. February same store sales were down 1.4% in the US leading to a negative 0.3% comp for global same store sales. That followed January where US comparable sales were off 3.3%. Yet again we hear the excuses follow close behind, where weather and “challenging industry [...]
Going back to the snow debunking from earlier today, the primary impediment to wider economic expansion outside of bifurcation and artificial monetary channels is income and employment. Mainstream commentary aside, employment has been mostly atrocious for some time. The clear divergence between the Establishment Survey and the Household Survey, both from the BLS, establishes that break in October 2012 – [...]
The persistence of frozen precipitations and the attendant temperatures that accompany them have somehow become an economic variable. I suppose it will be official once the Federal Reserve announces that it has updated all its DSGE models to include a snow gauge, rendering them truly dynamic in more than one sense. The “unexpected” reappearance of “unexpected” weakness is never pinned [...]
Summing up the holiday season, we keep hearing about resilient consumers as estimated sales come in a little better than anticipated earlier, while retailers purportedly are relieved despite limited incomes and a drop in actual traffic. And the entire season was marked by discounts, but in this final analysis that was supposed to be a positive factor. The gain exceeded [...]
In early 2010, economists had been delivered a twin bill of economic accounts that seemed to confirm recovery. GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 had been initially estimated at close to 6% and employment appeared to finally be bottoming out. The pace of GDP expansion even led to talk about that infamous V-shaped recovery of the plucking model. It [...]
The primary appeal of the Establishment Survey over the Household Survey is its lack of volatility. It is believed that gives the observer a greater degree of precision in estimating monthly changes in employment. In the case of the government shutdown in October, it appears as if that view has been confirmed. The Household Survey showed a very large decline [...]
There is something very much broken in the media, particularly with regard to economic reporting. I have already commented more times than I care about the overemphasis on logical fallacies, but the proportionality of the disconnect only grows with share price inflation. Under the headline, Bull Market Shows No Sign of Death With Yellen Support, this Bloomberg article begins, “The [...]
The ongoing divergence between the Establishment Survey (which is the “preferred” measure) and every other labor market indication was taken to an unbelievable extreme in October. Incongruous deterioration was everywhere but the Establishment Survey which shocked expectations with purported strength. The only strength in that survey is the straight line with which it follows, and that tells us nothing about [...]
The NBER considers employment and incomes as the two primary indications of economic cycles. Contrary to conventional thought, a recession is never defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. In issuing its November 2001 declaration for a cycle peak dated to March 2001, for example, the NBER said, “A recession is a significant decline in activity spread across the [...]
Since it is an employment report Friday it seems appropriate to continue on the theme of dysfunction in the labor market. I’ve already covered the more recent occurrences of the structural change post-2009, here I want to examine the foundation for this paradigm shift. As part of its academic arm, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a monthly review of [...]
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