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How Bad Was the July Jobs Report?
After arguing for over a year that it was time for the Fed to start lowering rates to avoid an economic slowdown, I feel a need to give a bit of pushback against all the folks who are now rushing to...
View ArticleIs NPR Prohibited from Talking About Profit Margins?
The network ran the second piece in three days blaming a weak economy for the fact that restaurants can’t sustain their inflated pandemic profit margins. The basic story here is that many restaurant...
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Manufacturing Jobs: Unions Made Them Good, Not the Factories
The effort to bring back manufacturing jobs has been a major theme in the 2024 election. Both parties say they consider this a high priority for the next administration. However, there is a notable...
View ArticleThe New York Times Thinks It’s a Bad Thing that Corporations Can’t Sustain...
Most of us might consider it good news that companies are being forced to roll back their pandemic price increases. Many major consumer product companies took advantage of the pandemic-induced supply...
View ArticleThe Economy Grew 2.8 Percent Last Quarter, CNN Is Trying to Decide Who Gets...
CNN’s coverage of the economy under President Biden has been unrelentingly negative, even as we have seen the longest stretch of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than seventy years, the fastest...
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Is “Drill Everywhere” Good News for the Oil Industry?
The Trump campaign has made “drill everywhere” one of its main campaign slogans, implying that it will radically weaken environmental and other restrictions on oil drilling. This is supposed to be good...
View ArticleWhy Does a Good Inflation Report Require NPR to Feature Two People Who Are...
The July Consumer Price Index report showed a slightly lower inflation rate than had generally been expected. Coupled with a good report on the Producer Price Index on Tuesday, it seems very likely the...
View ArticleVice-President Harris Proposes to Increase the Deficit by 0.5 Percent of GDP...
In an effort to promote hysteria, the media have jumped on the proposals laid out by Vice-President Harris, telling their audience that they will increase the deficit by $1.7 trillion over the next...
View ArticleThe WaPo’s Republican Columnists Just Make It Up
No one expects serious economic analysis from the Washington Post’s conservative columnists and Mark Theissen doesn’t let us down. Theissen starts off by reminding of one of Larry Summers’ most...
View ArticlePrices Are Still High, and Other Absurd Things Pushed by the Media
A couple of decades ago a candidate for Copenhagen’s city council ran on a platform that if he won, the wind would always be at bicycle riders’ backs. In a country where many people use bicycles for...
View ArticleMixed Story: What the Revision to the Jobs Data Means
I don’t have time to do an exhaustive analysis of the implication of the downward revisions to the jobs numbers today, but I will make a few quick points. First, the people complaining that this...
View ArticleE.J. Dionne, WaPo’s Liberal Columnist, Pushes Right-Wing Propaganda
E.J. Dionne is a decent person and offers reasonable takes on most policy issues, but he really is enmeshed in the right’s view of the world. In the middle of a piece praising Vice-President Harris’...
View ArticleYet Another in the Economy Is Bad Under Biden Series
Yes folks, like other major news outlets the Washington Post is perfectly happy to ignore the data to tell you the economy is bad under Biden. Past entries in this series included the many pieces...
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In the Last 18 Months Food Prices Have Risen by Just Over One Percent, So The...
Yes, I am serious. The media have no intention of allowing the data to get in the way of their bad economy stories. So not that food prices have pretty much stopped rising, the Guardian is coming to...
View ArticleDiverting Class Warfare into Generational Warfare
In the last-half century, productivity has outpaced the growth of real compensation for the median worker by more than 40 percent. This means that if workers’ pay had kept pace with productivity, as it...
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Rents May Already be Falling
Edward Glaeser had an interesting column in the NYT this morning which offered some useful suggestions for increasing housing construction and reducing rents. However, in making his case he does get...
View ArticleIn the Battle Against Inflation, We Have Already Gone the Last Mile
Peter Coy had a somewhat bizarre column in the New York Times yesterday warning us that even though we have gotten rid of most of the pandemic inflation with little rise in unemployment, “any further...
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Yes Folks, the Profit Share Has Risen Since the Pandemic
There continues to be a debate about the extent to which “price-gouging” or “greedflation” has been responsible for the rise in prices since the pandemic. We can debate the extent to which companies...
View ArticleThe Media Have Not Heard of the Government Accountability Office
In reporting on Donald Trump’s plan to put Elon Musk in charge of a commission to ferret out waste in government, it probably would have been worth noting that there is already an agency dedicated to...
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There Was a Housing Bubble in Atlanta Prior to the Crash
Kevin Erdmann argued in a Washington Post column on Thursday that the main problem with U.S. housing policy is over-restrictive lending rules from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. While there may be some...
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