70 Words

When Amazon went public in 1997 as a loss-making online bookseller, it issued shares at 2.9 times revenue. In 2004, Google’s shares debuted with an established and profitable advertising model backing its search engine and went public at 8.5 times…

Markets are now virtually certain the Fed will hike rates by year-end but doing so when inflation isn’t being transmitted into wages makes no sense. Average hourly earnings rose by +3.4% Y-o-Y in May, but inflation as measured by the…

From 24Q4 through 25Q4, the value of household equity portfolios rose $10.31 trillion, or 18% to $67.77 trillion. By contrast, house prices have increased little. Thus, a record 33% of household net wealth is now held in equities, well above…

May net job growth surged 172,000, March/April were revised up 93,000, and the broadest measure of unemployment declined from 8.2% to 8.1%, terrific. However, wage growth declined from 3.6% to 3.4% Y-o-Y, and almost all growth was regrettably in the…

The Friday File: Using Walmart grocery prices as a benchmark, the most expensive grocery store is Whole Foods, it’s 39.4% more expensive. Vons is 26.6% more costly, Albertson’s is 24.8% higher, Publix 20.3%, Kroger 14.8%, Meijer 9.9%, Safeway 8.8%, and…

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, speculated that by 2030 technological progress would be so profound that a 15-hour workweek would be sufficient to satisfy our needs. While productivity skyrocketed and incomes…

While not data points, newspaper headlines like “Real Estate Agents Quit as Housing Market Slouches,” “Retailers Cut Prices to Lure Struggling Shoppers,” and “Gap in Profits, Worker Pay Widens” suggest consumers are hurting. Here’s the supporting data. Adjusted for inflation…

Over the last year real consumer spending has risen 2.1%, which is slightly below the past decade’s average. The problem is personal income; over the past year it hasn’t grown. What’s propped up spending is the equities melt-up and a…

US labor productivity generally increases 1%/year. Given the number of nonfarm US employees is 160 million, that means rising productivity leads, all else equal, to permanent job losses of 1.6 million employees/year. If AI doubles labor productivity growth to 2%/year,…

The Friday File: This week, Shrey Parikh beat Ishaan Gupta in a lightening-round 90-second spell-off tiebreaker, a format introduced in 2022, to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Shrey spelled 32 words correctly, Ishaan only 25. The spell-off is the…