Econ70

Tonight Festivus is celebrated. Conceived of by author Daniel O’Keefe and celebrated as far back as 1966, the date celebrates the anniversary of Mr. O’Keefe’s first date with his future wife, Deborah. The holiday was made famous in 1996 when…

The Friday File: The holiday of Hanukkah begins this Sunday night. This is the 2,184th time the holiday celebration commemorating the liberation of Jerusalem and the rededication of Second Temple will be celebrated. Over the course of the eight-day holiday,…

While the US and Chinese economies look to be stabilizing and even strengthening, the same cannot be said for Europe. Business activity there is growing at its slowest rate since 2013. Manufacturing activity is in recession and is steadily deteriorating,…

US GDP only includes legal activities. It really should include black-market activities like illegal drug sales, prostitution, theft, gambling, and so on. If it did, GDP would be about 1%, or $210 billion larger; the GDP of Alabama. In 1980,…

November housing starts came in at an annualized rate of 1.365 million, up a strong 13.6% Y-o-Y. Single-family starts were up 16.7% Y-o-Y; multifamily was up 4.4% Y-o-Y. Despite these seemingly strong Y-o-Y numbers, YTD starts are up a scant…

Last month, women comprised exactly 50% of employed persons in the US. The last and only other time this occurred was in 2009-2010, when male employment collapsed due to the massive loss of manufacturing and construction jobs during the Great…

While the average price of a Christmas tree in 2018 was $76.35, there was great variation over time. On 11/23/18, Black Friday, the first major tree buying day, the average price was $79.11. It then peaked at $83.92 on 11/26/18,…

In an effort to boost the value of Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company) to $2 trillion, the Saudis reduced the offering size to just 1.5% from 5%, listed it on the Saudi stock exchange and not in NY or London,…

At 24.3% of GDP, the US tax burden is lower than all but three OECD (36 western democracies) nations; Chile, Ireland and Mexico. The US tax rate is exactly 10 percentage points lower than the OECD average rate. In 2000,…

This past Sunday, former Fed Chairman extraordinaire Paul Volker died. During his helm (1979-1987), he unequivocally changed economic history. He not only fought relentlessly for central bank independence but slayed runaway 1970s inflation. Because of the latter, he was one…