The Bowtie Economist's Daily Dose of 70-Word Wisdom

After peaking at a painfully high 15% in 4/20, the Misery Index, the sum of the unemployment rate and the annual inflation rate, fell steadily and bottomed out at 7.7% during 1/21. It then rapidly rose due to, among other…

Median rent fell 0.4% Y-o-Y in March to $1,937, the first decline since 3/20. Rents are 19.9% higher than they were in 3/20. The biggest decline was in Austin, where rents fell 11% to $2,104, followed by Chicago where they…

The Friday File: The median airplane traveler would pay an extra 5%-10% for an adult-only flight that’s up to three hours in duration. For a six-hour flight, it’s 10%-20%. When asked how much extra they would pay to sit in…

At present, worker quit rates are running at about 2.6%/month, which results in average hourly wage growth of about 4.5%/annum. At that rate, and assuming inflation elsewhere becomes quiescent, inflation will run at about 3.5%/year, one-and-a-half points above the Fed’s…

The March Y-o-Y Core CPI reading of 5.6%, up from 5.5% gives the Fed permission to raise Fed fund by 25bps on 5-3-23. But the hikes end there. Banking is struggling. System-wide deposits collapsed at a 30% annualized rate in…

PC shipments by the top five PC makers plummeted from 72 million in 19Q4 to 55 million in 20Q1. Sales then jumped and averaged 85 million from 20Q3 through 21Q4. They have since declined and in 23Q1 were just 57…

Net March job growth was 236,000, the smallest increase since 12/19, except for -268,000 in 12/20. This, along with rising first-time unemployment claims, reduced job openings, and the decline in the work week, point to a softening but still strong…

The Friday File: To improve the odds of getting the interior Oreo cream to glom onto both the top and bottom biscuit when twisted, researchers at MIT used a rheometer to squish and twist the biscuits in opposite directions. After…

While generative artificial intelligence (think ChatGPT) may eliminate white collar jobs, unlike previous technological breakthroughs which came for blue collar jobs, the fear of large job losses is ludicrous. Electricity, telephones, the internet, and other innovations have never reduced the…

Prior to Covid, the percentage of new products and services was about 18.5%. Due to Covid, supply-chain breakdowns, inflation, rising interest rates, bulging inventories, and changing work patterns, the percentage of new goods and services fell to 16% in 2022,…