Posts Tagged ‘eisenberg and economics’
Horsing Around
The Friday File: The highest-priced stallion syndication was for Fusaichi Pegasus at a reported $60 million in 2000, while the record stud fee remains $500,000 for Northern Dancer in the mid-1980’s. The most paid for a thoroughbred at auction was $16 million in 2006 for two year-old The Green Monkey (who retired from racing after…
Read MoreDiminishing Deficit
The US trade deficit was $38.8 billion in August, virtually unchanged from July and has been hovering around $40 billion/month since early 2010. Before the Great Recession, it was about $60 billion/month. The difference, oil imports are down about $20 billion/month due to rising domestic production. Our deficit with China was $29.9 billion last month.…
Read MoreWeak Work
The 148,000 new jobs reported in the delayed September employment report are profoundly disappointing. New jobs have now averaged 143,000 this past quarter, 182,000 in Q2 and 207,000 in Q1. At the current rate, it will take until September 2014, or 68 months, to bring the total employment level back to where it was in…
Read MoreMoving Money
The velocity of money is the number of times a unit of currency is used to buy domestically produced goods and services during a fixed period of time. The velocity of M1 (cash and checking accounts) has fallen by 38% since the start of the Great Recession, while M2 (M1 plus savings accounts, CDs and…
Read MoreDeficient Data
The CPI is based on 83,300 price quotes/month, but because the government was closed for 11 working days in October, the sample will be based on 40,000 price quotes. Because price quotes for some items are collected bi-annually, it will take six months for inflation data to fully recover from the small October sample. Worse,…
Read MoreRepresentative Salaries
The Friday file: Legislators in CA are paid best at $90,000/year, with PA second at about $83,000/year. NY is third at $79,000, followed by MI and IL at about $70,000/year. By contrast, NM pays legislators nothing, NH pays them $100/year, AL $1,000/year and MT $3,700/year. With 120 legislators for 38 million people, lawmakers in CA…
Read MoreSudsy Sales
The Friday File: The economy is improving! Beer volume rose 1.2% in 2012, to 2.8 billion cases – that’s 210 beers/person, pushing revenues up 3.5% to $62.3 billion. This largely makes up for the 1.3% decline in beer volume in 2011. Super-premium, domestic craft and imports are fermenting heady sales, while mainstream domestics are losing…
Read MoreTaper Tiger
Given the government closure and resulting lack of economic data, the fact that Q3 GDP growth will be below 2% and that inflation remains very tame, virtually guarantees that tapering will not commence following the conclusion of the late October Fed interest rate setting meeting. Now with the formal nomination of Janet Yellen for the…
Read MoreWomen’s Work
Full-time working women earned 76.5 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2012, virtually unchanged from 2011. Interestingly, pay gaps are narrowing for all but the youngest. Women 25 to 44 earned 80 cents, up from 74 cents in 1993. Similarly women 45 to 64 earned 73 cents up from 61 cents in 1993.…
Read MoreDebt Ceiling Catastrophe
The government shutdown, if short, will mildly depress Q4 GDP growth. The same can’t be said for failing to raise the debt ceiling. The government currently runs a $640 billion deficit/year, 4% of GDP, while GDP growth is 2%. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the budget must be balanced, thus federal spending would drop…
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