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Many stores offer low-price-match guarantees. On the surface this protects consumers. But it can harm them too. Once convinced that a store will match a lower price, customers may not shop around to find better prices. Moreover, if multiple stores offer a low-price-match, reduced prices won’t boost sales and the price-match becomes a form of…

Last Friday’s employment numbers were good, not great. 295,000 net new jobs is outstanding, and employment growth during the last year has been the best since 2000. Better yet, almost all the new jobs are in the private sector, almost all are full-time, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5%. But the labor force shrunk…

The Friday File: The cost of raising a child from birth to college is $245,340, or $13,630/year for families with annual incomes of $82,790. Of course this excludes college costs and forgone income while being a stay-at-home parent. Conservatively those two items sum to over $150,000, bringing the total cost/child to an eye-watering $395,000! No…

In Obama’s first term, 2.018 million private sector jobs were created. That total beats both of W’s terms, and Bush Sr.’s only term, but doesn’t come close to the over 10 million jobs created in each of Clinton’s terms. However, so far in Obama’s second term, 5.542 million jobs have been created. At this pace…

While 3.2 million new jobs were created in 2014 making it a great year for job creation, GDP grew by a very pedestrian 2.4%. This suggests that labor productivity is either growing very slowly, or worse, may be declining. Either way, it means when labor force slack disappears inflation pressures may quickly build, absent Fed…

Net neutrality is a fight over who pays for Internet infrastructure. Now, large content providers (Netflix) help pay, but under the new FCC rules they won’t be allowed to. Thus, households will pay more. But as they are more price sensitive than content providers, usage will probably fall. As for future Internet investment, in the…

The Friday File: The evidence that the economy is improving is now irrefutable as the tooth fairy left an average of $4.36/lost tooth in 2014, a whopping increase of 25% from 2013. As recently as 2011, the TF left a stingy $2.60. Teeth in the South were most valuable at $5.16 each but were worth…

The January CPI numbers came out today and Y-o-Y inflation was -0.2%, yes, prices actually fell one-fifth of one percent. Before rejoicing, note that deflation is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it boosts worker pay since any raise is now a real raise. But it harms monetary policy because banks don’t lend at negative…

By not reducing the supply of oil in the face of falling demand, Saudi Arabia has caused the price of oil to plummet. That has caused households to increase their real consumption of gasoline by 4%, boosted purchases of light trucks by about 10% and reduced sales of hybrids and electric cars by about 9%.…