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unemployment insurance

Simple Economics and Money Math

By |2022-06-09T20:08:48-04:00June 9th, 2022|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The BLS’s most recent labor market data is, well, troubling. Even the preferred if artificially-smooth Establishment Survey indicates that something has changed since around March. A slowdown at least, leaving more questions than answers (from President Phillips).That as much because of the other employment figures, the Household Survey. April and May, in particular, not just a slowdown but a drop [...]

The Wile E. Powell Inflation: Are We Really Just Going To Ignore The Cliff?

By |2021-11-03T13:27:15-04:00November 3rd, 2021|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Last year did not end on a sound note. The initial rebound after 2020’s recession was supposed to be a straight line, lifting upward for the other side of the infamous “V” shape. Such hopes had been dashed, though, and as the disappointing year wound toward its own end yet another big problem loomed. In December 2020, millions of Americans [...]

Can We Reconcile Jobless Claims To Payrolls?

By |2021-04-07T18:03:45-04:00April 7th, 2021|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that in the month of March 2021 somewhere around 916,000 payrolls were added back to the economy. I have to disclaim the figure simply because the statistics used to create it aren’t really all that precise; piecing together data from a survey of 145,000 business establishments, a fraction of the economy’s total, the [...]

The Smallest Bit of Empathy For The Swollen Herd

By |2021-01-21T20:12:01-05:00January 21st, 2021|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Why isn’t the inflation monster right upon us? Well, for one, central banks only pretend to do money. But setting that aside, it’s worth asking how even if they did do money, could inflation result given the current conditions? Hard no.It’s a combination of enormous macro slack joining destructive forces with the underside of the permanent income hypothesis. The point [...]

Inflation Binary

By |2020-12-21T17:11:46-05:00December 21st, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Blame Milton Friedman for this one, too. The economist made many significant contributions to the advancement of economic understanding, but perhaps an equal number of extreme errors. For one thing, that whole bout with bank reserves and “high powered money” (what became QE) recommended in the late nineties to cure Japan of its obvious monetary illness. This followed from the [...]

Inflation Hysteria #2 (Slack-edotes)

By |2020-12-10T19:54:05-05:00December 10th, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Macroeconomic slack is such an easy, intuitive concept that only Economists and central bankers (same thing) could possibly mess it up. But mess it up they have. Spending years talking about a labor shortage, and getting the financial media to report this as fact, those at the Federal Reserve, in particular, pointed to this as proof QE and ZIRP had [...]

Don’t Really Need ‘Em, Few More Nails Anyway

By |2020-12-03T18:56:53-05:00December 3rd, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI continued to decelerate from its high registered all the way back in July 2020. In that month, the headline index reached 58.1, the best since early 2019, and for many signaling that everything was coming up “V.” Since, however, it’s been a slow downward trend that, when realizing early 2019 wasn’t exactly robust, only reconfigures the [...]

The Established Slowdown of Today vs. At Least Tomorrow’s Vaccine Is Not The Same ‘Stimulus’

By |2020-11-25T18:25:43-05:00November 25th, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The oil market has caught a mild case of the raging disease. Not COVID, rather the purported cure for it. Vaccine-phoria has visited the energy sector and propelled oil prices upward while pulling less contango in the futures curve, awakening this commodity market from its post-August doldrums. It had been that detour in WTI which began to suggest this summer [...]

Revolving Claims Labor Market Destruction

By |2020-07-10T17:11:11-04:00July 10th, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

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 [...]

Recovery Begins By Overturning Neutrality

By |2017-02-10T12:09:57-05:00February 10th, 2017|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Quantum physics has always had a math problem, one that even in its early days the leading physicists were troubled about. Einstein famously remarked, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment now known simply as “Schrödinger’s cat” was meant to mock the Copenhagen interpretation rather than help explain it. But we live in an age [...]

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