Upon the precipice of the Great “Recession”, US workers were cushioned to some extent by what economists call sticky wages. Before the Great Depression, as well as during it, companies would attempt to deal with looming economic contraction by cutting pay rates before workers. Nowadays, the intent is reversed; businesses will try to keep core workers by keeping pay rates [...]
It was coming, it wasn’t coming. On again, off again. Voluntary evacuations, all clears, and then the rushed mandatory removals. When Hurricane Bonnie finally made landfall, it left people more angry than usual with these kinds of storms. Weather officials just didn’t know where it would end up. In eventually would smack right into Virginia’s Tidewater region, after wreaking variable [...]
One last part of the CPI report that is worth mentioning is more directly economic than monetary. Rents have been rising for some time, though as I showed last month not wholly out of line with past periods. Before both the dot-com recession as well as Great “Recession” the rent component of the CPI surged upward. It peaked at just [...]
Basic economics has proven that when the supply of something dwindles, absent an offsetting drop in demand the price should rise. When translating these fundamental terms to the labor market especially of the past few years, the supply means “slack” or the available pool of workers not yet working; demand has been, we are told repeatedly, very robust; therefore the [...]
The nominal changes in average pay in the past few months, and really going back to October 2012, are not really consistent with the orthodox idea of a reduction in “slack” in the labor market. By that I mean wage growth has been lagging at the same time the mainstream payroll indication has moved upward. It is certainly possible for [...]
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