In December of 2019, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 3.6% and prime age labor force participation, at 82.9%, was at an 11 year high. Today, December 2020 jobs figures […]
Author: Bob Barbera
Closing the Fire Station, to Motivate Less Smoking in Bed
In the spring of 2009, amid the darkest moments of the Great Recession, I published a book and a blogpost. The book, reviewed here, championed the notion that mainstream […]
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NYT > Business > DealBook
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Sorkin: Dresses, Cruises and Other Signs of LifeView More
The best kind of stimulus
No sooner was the ink dry on the March 27 $2 trillion stimulus package than Washington began work on the next stimulus. This is the right thing to do. Deficit […]
COVID-19 Data: Signal versus Noise
Two burning questions confront all of us:
How big is our public health problem?
How sharp is our economic retrenchment?
We think that the toolkit of economic forecasters has something […]
Embracing Distancing and Cushioning the Blow to the Economy
The global COVID-19 outbreak now sports exponential growth rates for cases and deaths on every continent save Antarctica. Students of the economy must add that we are also in the […]
The Saudis, the Russians, the Chinese…and the Greens, Four Dimensional Chess in the Time of Corona
Crude oil prices plunged on Monday, as Saudi Arabia has announced that they will ramp up production to punish recalcitrant OPEC members, including and especially Russia. Rising supply alongside a […]
Gangbusters Jobs Growth and No Fed Tightening. A Snapshot Unlikely to Persist.
President Trump tweeted on Christmas Eve that he was “all alone (poor me).” It was a sentiment with which Fed Chairman Jerome Powell could sympathize.
As 2018 came to a […]
Zero Bound
The outlook for growth in employment and corporate earnings over the next few years is headed down.
The problem is not what the Federal Reserve will do, or what a […]
Workers Return, Oldsters Retire, and the Jobless Rate Continues to Fall.
What did We Learn from Recent Monetary Policy Performance?
A growing chorus of commentators are now issuing warnings about additional Fed tightening in light of the flattening Treasury yield curve. Despite clear evidence that job growth in the U.S. […]
The slope of the yield curve and lessons from recent history
Faster Growth, More Wage Income and Better Data Provision
Once a year we get a slew of news about U.S. economic performance, when the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) provides both its initial estimate for recent economic […]
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