Econ70

The Friday File: For the five years ending 7/31/16, the most popular opera composer was Giuseppe Verdi, with 14% of global performances. W.A. Mozart was next at 10%, then Puccini at 9%, and Rossini, Wagner and Donizetti all at about…

The next shock to the global economy may come this Sunday. That’s when Italians vote on constitutional changes that Prime Minister Renzi has bet his job on and that aim to reduce institutional paralysis. Polls show Renzi’s referendum failing, forcing…

Net income at all 5,980 FDIC insured banks rose $5.2 billion Y-o-Y to $45.6 billion in 16Q3. Looking at the subset of 5,521 community banks, quarterly net income rose $593 million Y-o-Y to $5.6 billion. Better yet, fewer than 5%…

One reason existing home sales and inventory have recovered so slowly is a decline in moving. The percentage of Americans that moved fell to an all-time low of 11.2% in 2016 from a peak of 42% in the early 1950s.…

US consumer sentiment surged in November to 93.8, its best reading since 5/16, and up from 91.6 in mid-November and 87.2 in October, which matched a two-year low. While the mid-November reading was based on interviews through election day, the…

The Friday File: The costliest retail location in the world is 5th Avenue in NYC between 49th and 60th Streets; the rent is $3,500/square foot/year. Next comes Causeway Bay in Hong Kong at $2,399, the Champs Elysees in Paris at…

51 million turkeys costing $1 billion will be eaten this Thanksgiving by the 85% of Americans who will eat turkey. There is an 18% chance you bird comes from Minnesota and a 14% chance it comes from NC. The average…

Sales of heavy trucks, those weighing over seven tons, peaked at a seasonally adjusted rate of 555,000 in 8/06, but then buckled in the Great Recession to 181,000 by 5/09. Sales then quickly recovered to 479,000 by 6/15 then fell…

Talk of walling off Mexico, deporting illegals and ripping up NAFTA has, unsurprisingly, hit Mexico hard. Despite repeated increases in interest rates to defend the peso, one US dollar now buys 20.5 pesos, up from 18.3 right before the election,…

The Friday File: By requiring readers to understand characters’ motivations and intuit their feelings, reading literary fiction is highly correlated with, and possibly fosters, empathy towards others. Moreover, fiction readers also have richer social networks than those that read less…