The Friday File: The highest paid professional team mascot is the Denver Nugget’s ‘Rocky the Mountain Lion’ with a salary of a staggering $625,000/year, followed by the Atlanta Hawk’s ‘Harry the Hawk’ at $600,000/year, and the Chicago Bull’s ‘Benny the…
To return home buyer affordability to its pre-Covid level, one of the following must happen: wages must rise 56%, lifting the median household wage to $132,000/year, the 30-year mortgage rate must fall 2.65% (assuming no resulting increase in home prices),…
After comparing $4 trillion of international shipments to the US between 1/24 and 11/25, researchers find foreign exporters absorbed 4% of recent tariff increases, American consumers and importers absorbed the remaining 96%. This shows tariffs, as predicted by economic theory,…
While unlikely, these outcomes are all possible: an indictment of Powell; an administration win in Cook v. Trump; Powell staying on the board after his Chair term expires; a Fed Board Chair vs FOMC Chair split; a Fed Chair loyal…
December median existing home sales jumped 5.1% M-o-M but just 1.4% Y-o-Y and remain near historic lows. A strong reason for any sort of sales bump is prices are falling. The median price has fallen for the second straight month,…
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…