Thomas Barkin is President and CEO of the Federal Reserve’s Fifth District branch headquartered in Richmond. Beginning the job during the tumultuous and confusing 2018 (for those wherever at the Fed), Barkin in 2021 is and has been a voting FOMC member. Whether he is judged a “hawk”, “dove”, or some other kind of feathering maniac I’d leave to the [...]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Some see the cup as half empty. Some see the cup as half full. I see the cup as too large. George Carlin The quote from Dickens above is one that just about everyone knows even if they don't [...]
The number of Job Openings for the month of July were revised upward, the BLS now thinking there had been more than 11 million of them during that month. Companies seem to be desperate for workers, at least judging by this one measure. The latest estimate for August 2021 came in well short of either the revised figure (11.1 million) [...]
Here we are again. The labor force. The numbers from the BLS are simply staggering. During September 2021, the government believes it shrank for another month, down by 183,000 when compared to August. This means that the Labor Force Participation rate declined slightly to 61.6%, practically the same level in this key metric going back to June.Last June.These millions, yes, [...]
How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to take risk and experience higher [...]
New orders, new orders, new orders. That’s the substance of the inventory cycle. A lot more of them, the upswing in it can remain intact keeping the global manufacturing economy humming along. Should they start to scale back and then, maybe at some point, decline, this unusual supply-constraint trend transitions toward a more historical inventory cycle on the downturn. As [...]
Is it delta COVID? Or the widely reported labor shortage? Something has created a soft patch in the presumed indestructible US economy still hopped up on Uncle Sam’s deposits made earlier in the year. And yet, there’s a nagging feeling over how this time, like all previous times, just might be too good to be true, too. To start with, [...]
In Massachusetts, the Federal Reserve’s First District, restaurateurs have struggled mightily to find workers. As part of the central bank’s Beige Book, one contact of the Boston leadership said the industry was “facing the worst labor shortage he has seen in 35 years of experience.” In response to such a major threat, these firms become truly creative to try to [...]
It was a highly curious change in the shape of the labor force. Beginning October 2015 and lasting until March 2016, for six months Americans came flooding back into the labor market. Or, so they said. When the BLS’s various surveyors working on the Current Population Survey (known as the Household Survey) came calling for answers each month, all of [...]
It doesn’t really make much sense, does it? If you stop and think about it for more than a quick second, this notion of a labor shortage doesn’t get past the smell test. The economy overall is, we hear, booming. Really booming. And it’s booming in a way that has the labor market healing far faster than thought not long [...]
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