Month: June 2014

Wonky Wages

06/30/2014

Seattle’s decision to boost its minimum wage to $15/hour, the highest anywhere, is bad policy. Unlike a rise in the federal minimum wage which affects all employers, this increase only applies inside the city. Thus, employers in low-wage industries in…

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Super Stamp

06/27/2014

The Friday File: Last week the only British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp (BGOCM) was sold at auction for a record $9.48 million, breaking the old record of $2.2 million for the Treskilling Yellow in 1996. Amazingly, the BGOCM has broken…

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Wretched War

06/26/2014

This Saturday is the 100th anniversary of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria — heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne — and his wife Sophie – which set in motion the start of WWI exactly one month later. 8.5…

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Pathetic Predictions

06/25/2014

On 4/30/14 Q1 GDP (which ended a month earlier) was estimated at 0.1%. On 5/29/14 it was revised down to -1.0%, and on 6/25/14, three months after the end of Q1, it was knocked down to -2.9%! The difference between…

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Nice News!

06/24/2014

On Monday we learned that existing home sales in May jumped 4.9% to a rate of 4.89 million/year, the best pace since last October. Better yet, yesterday we learned that new home sales jumped from a rate of 433,000/year in…

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Alternative Approaches

06/23/2014

Inflation as measured by the CPI is 2.1%, as measured by personal consumption expenditures (PCE) is 1.6%, below the Fed’s 2% target. Importantly, the Fed uses the PCE to monitor inflation. Historically, the PCE is 0.5% lower than the CPI,…

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Budget Brew

06/20/2014

The Friday File: Dividing the cost of a beer by the minimum wage tells you how much work it takes to buy suds. Amazingly, it takes 12 minutes to afford a beer in Puerto Rico and 18 minutes to buy…

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Book Betting

06/19/2014

The current fight between book publisher Hachette and Amazon over pricing is one between a cartel (the publishers) and a monopolist (Amazon). Turns out e-books are 40% more profitable for publishers and 40% less remunerative to authors than hardcover books!…

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Fed Following

06/18/2014

At today’s press conference, Fed Chairwoman Yellen did away with forward guidance. Instead, she suggested that the Fed will rely on an array of lagging economic indicators to set policy. She is signaling that the Fed will keep interest rates…

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Bullish Britain

06/17/2014

Across the pond, the UK economy is really picking up. Employment is up sharply, real GDP rose 3.1% in the first quarter, the best growth since 2008, the labor force participation rate is 72.9%, the highest it has been almost…

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