Econ70

The Friday File: Cars have a small arrow on the dashboard telling drivers which side of the car the gas tank is on. That’s the Moylan Arrow, named after Ford engineer Jim Moylan, who died last month at 80. He…

To improve housing affordability, President Trump is considering banning large institutional investors from buying single-family houses. This is a bad idea. First, there are about 16 million rental homes in the US and large institutional investors own 2%. Second, the…

If an economy is at full employment and enjoys stable inflation, wage growth will equal labor productivity growth plus inflation (LPG+I). If wages exceed LPG+I, unemployment is too low and inflationary pressure will build. If the opposite is true, there’s…

When economists were recently asked if giving the President more influence over monetary policy would lead to substantially worse monetary policy decisions, 80% strongly agreed, 14% agreed, 2% were uncertain, and 5% strongly disagreed. The reason is that elected officials…

December job growth was a listless 50,000. Worse, October/ November growth was reduced by 76,000. While the unemployment rate declined, it did so only because the labor force participation rate fell. More generally, monthly job growth averaged just 29% of…

The Friday File: Rather than making New Year’s resolutions that are avoidance goals such as ‘I will not read economics’, or ‘I will not use my iPhone after 8pm’, try approach-oriented resolutions. They might include, ‘I will eat tofu once…

November job openings sank to 7.146 million, down 303K from October and are down 512,000 in the last two months. They are now at their second-lowest level since 10/20. Moreover, hiring slid 253,000, the biggest one-month decline since 6/24 and…

Two new academic studies analyzing tariffs essentially find that their indirect effects on production, consumption, and employment tend to swamp the effects on inflation. These studies find that tariffs tend to result in milder inflation or even deflation due to…

While AI hyperscalers like OpenAI will earn revenue from subscription fees, that’s almost irrelevant. The main societal transformation will come from AI replacing repetitive human mental tasks, for example, accounting, computer programing, and financial advising, as opposed to earlier technological…

Prior to the S&L crisis/recession of 1980, the bottom 80% of the US population were responsible for almost 45% of consumer spending, and the top 10% for slightly over 40%. Today, the bottom 80% are down to just 37% of…