Month: April 2022

Total Taxes

04/15/2022

The Friday File: Looking at tax burden – the proportion of personal income paid towards state and local taxes – NY has the highest burden at 12.75%, followed by HI at 12.70%, ME at 11.42%, VT at 11.13%, and MN…

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Purchasing Predictability

04/14/2022

Historically, new home construction and auto sales were generally good indicators of the economic health of households. Now, less so. With supply-chains a mess, input prices up dramatically, and labor in short supply, lower-priced product is not much being made,…

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Fed Funk

04/13/2022

Chair Powell points out that in 1965, 1984, and 1994, the Fed raised rates and a recession didn’t ensue. However, in all those cases the Fed was pre-emptive and was trying to prevent inflation from rising. Now they need to…

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Inflationary Impacts

04/12/2022

While inflation is more pronounced in the USA at roughly 8%, it’s now over 5% in 58% of advanced economies, and over 7% in 55% of emerging economies. Even excluding energy, inflation has increased widely. This suggests that both rounds…

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Sixties Similarities

04/11/2022

For the week ending 4/2/22, the number of first-time claims for unemployment, a proxy for layoffs, was a remarkable 166,000, the lowest level since the week ending 11/30/68, well over 50 years ago, when the US population was 60% of…

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Odd Oscars

04/08/2022

The Friday File: Viewership of the Oscars peaked in 1998 at 55 million. It then held steady at 40 million through 2015, then collapsed, bottoming at 10 million last year and recovering to 16.6 million last week. But the real…

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Office Occupancy

04/07/2022

Among the ten US cities with the highest current office occupancy rates, the average rate through mid-March is 39.50%, equal to what it was before Omicron pushed it down to slightly below 20%. Returning to 100%, where it was pre-Covid-19…

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Energy Excise

04/06/2022
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Marital Movement

04/05/2022

At the peak in 1949, 78.8% of households contained married couples. By 2021, that percentage had declined to 47.3%. Simultaneously, single-person households rose from 3.8% in 1960 to 11.1% in 2021. Relatedly, age at first marriage bottomed in 1956 at…

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Interest Inversion

04/04/2022

Recently, the yield on the two-year Treasury rose slightly above the 10-year Treasury rate, a phenomenon known as an inverted yield curve, often a harbinger of recession or at least a slump and bad times. That said, which pairs of…

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