Econ70

The Friday File: Last year, US airlines carried 849 million passengers, up 3.1% versus 2016. That’s not where the growth is. In 2017, the number of pets carried by US carriers reached 784,000, up 11%. Pets are generally transported for…

Research shows that high-performing sales representatives are more likely to be promoted into management. For example, a doubling of sales boosts the probability of promotion by 15% above baseline. But the new manager’s pre-promotion doubling of sales is also associated…

While the percentage of Americans who say that they are either doing OK or living comfortably is 74%, up from 63% in 2013, the first year for which data are available, many Americans struggle financially. Fully 40% of Americans say…

Last week, Apple became the first US firm to surpass $1 trillion in value. In 2007, PetroChina first hit this milestone; it’s now worth $200 billion. There is little doubt that Apple, along with Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, (each worth…

July’s net job growth of 157,000 was solid, especially considering the closure of Toys “R” Us, which resulted in 32,000 job losses in hobby and game stores. May and June were substantially revised up, the broadest measure of unemployment hit…

The Friday File: Looking only at native speakers, the most spoken language in the world is Chinese with 1.3 billion first-language speakers. A distant second is Spanish with almost 440 million speakers. English is third with 372 million native speakers,…

At the beginning of 2018, one US dollar was worth about 41,000 Iranian rials. By the time President trump pulled the US out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, the exchange rate was 60,000 rials/dollar and now it is 120,000 rials/dollar.…

Last Thursday Facebook lost $119 billion, 19% of its market value, after predicting slowing revenue growth in the remainder of 2018. It was the largest one-day dollar decline for a US company ever, ahead of Intel’s $90 drop in 4/00.…

In 2017, federal government revenues were $3.316 trillion, of which 1%, or $34.6 billion, came from tariffs. While more money will come from tariffs, how much is unknown. Firms may import non-tariffed substitutes, they may buy the product from a…