Econ70

The IMF is predicting global growth of just 3.3% in 2020, but that’s up from 2.9% in 2019, the slowest growth since the Great Recession. The improvement is due to aggressive global monetary easing, the US-China trade truce, diminished fears…

In 2019, US sales of autos and light trucks totaled 16.9 million. 2019 is the first year since 2014, when sales were 16.5 million, that auto sales fell below 17 million. Sales peaked in 2016 at 17.5 million and have…

December housing starts jumped an amazing 40.8% Y-o-Y! Single-family rose 29.6% Y-o-Y, while multifamily rose a staggering 74.6% Y-o-Y, although CY2019 starts grew just 3.2% versus CY2018. The December rise is entirely weather related; Midwest starts jumped 85.4% Y-o-Y and…

The Friday File: The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on 1/17/1919 and went into effect a year later; 100 years ago today! Massachusetts was the first state to pass a temperance law in 1838, and in 1846 Maine…

The US manufacturing sector is in its worst shape since the end of the Great Recession in 6/09 and is firmly shrinking; it’s the second time since the end of the Great Recession. Although this contraction is slightly worse than…

The CY2019 deficit is $1.02 trillion and Y-o-Y it grew 17.1%. While that’s down from a 28.2% rise in 2018, it’s no reason to celebrate. In 2018, tax cuts dramatically reduced revenues. In 2019, revenues rose 5%, but expenditures rose…

New research has tentatively reconfirmed earlier findings that simply installing commercially available $700 air filters in classrooms that were void of any noxious fumes to begin with raised math scores by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard…

December net job growth of 145,000 brings CY2019 employment gains to 2.1 million, down from almost 2.7 million in 2018. While job growth has slowed, average growth over the past decade has been 2.2 million/year, so it remains sufficiently solid…

The Friday File: In 1851, scientists established body temperature at 98.6 degrees. After reexamining almost 700,000 temperature readings since 1840, researchers find body temperature has been steadily falling by 1/20 of a degree per birth decade. After accounting for measurement…

In 1981, the median age of the US homebuyer was 31. By 1989, it had drifted up to 34, and just after the relatively mild 1990 recession, it shot up to 42. By 1997, it bottomed at 35 and since…