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United States Channel: Latest Posts
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United States
Tearing Apart January 2012 NFP Data
Despite the cries of the permabears and Rick Santelli, this was unequivocally a strong NFP report. The headline numbers were 243,000 net jobs, as unemployment dipped to 8.3%. The Labor Pool increased — suggesting that the improvement was not the usual employee retirement and discouraged worked giving up looking for work. When we go beneath [...]
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United States
Private Payrolls Post a Surprisingly Strong Gain in January
Today’s employment report from the U.S. Labor Department delivered a hefty blow against the idea that recession risk is high for the immediate future. Private nonfarm payrolls rose by a net 257,000 in January (total nonfarm payrolls rose by a slightly lower 243,000 because of a 14,000 decrease in the government’s workforce). That’s the strongest [...]
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United States
NFP: Outliers Are Where Investing Risks Lay
Today we find out just how seasonal those 200,000 new jobs were in December 2011. Consensus is for employment to grow by 140,000 — about par with population growth. Unemployment is expected to be unchanged at 8.5%. As I am so fond of writing, no single month’s NFP matters all that much — focus on [...]
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Ed Dolan's Econ Blog
What Happened to Corporate Tax Reform?
President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address contained ringing language on corporate tax reform: Over the years, a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are [...]
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United States
Jobless Claims Continue to Trend Lower
Reading this morning’s latest weekly update on jobless claims inspires the question: When will we see evidence that a new recession is here, or lurking in the near future? The answer: Not today. If there’s a clear sign that the economy’s set to tumble, it’s not obvious in last week’s new applications for unemployment benefits. [...]
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United States
Five Long-Term Unemployment Questions
By Anna W: Tomorrow is (yet again) NFP day. While everyone is worrying about whether the December numbers were merely seasonal, we should also consider some of the longer term trends in Unemployment. These have major repercussions for Retail Sales and the ongoing Housing Weakness. Fortunately, Pew Trusts gave us a full overview: How Long [...]
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United States
The Republican Myth of Obama’s “Entitlement Society”
One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.” In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” Gingrich [...]
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United States
January Employment Report Preview
Friday’s employment situation report is the big statistical release of the week. Billions in market cap will swing on speculative conclusions about preliminary survey data. The question is so important that we insist on making unwarranted inferences. This month we have a special treat. We have a timely update on how the BLS is doing [...]
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United States
If Only Bloggers Ran the Fed…
From the latest Kauffman Economic Outlook, a quarterly survey of economic bloggers, we find this figure: Too bad bloggers cannot run the Fed. At least we have changed the conversation so that the Fed is talking about NGDP targeting. P.S. A note to those bloggers who want the central bank to target repo rates. If [...]
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United States
Why Is the Normally Astute Taibbi Sounding Like a Hopey Dopey Liberal on the Mortgage Settlement?
I hate taking issue with Matt Taibbi. I’m a huge fan of his writing and think he has done more to cause the big bad banks discomfort than any single writer. But even someone as skilled as Taibbi occasionally has the writing equivalent of a bad hair day. And his post, “A Victory for the [...]
