Archive for March 2015

While housing starts were positively rotten last month, weather was a key factor. That said, permits are much less weather sensitive than starts, with a very small margin of error. While overall permits were up 4%, single-family permit activity was down 6.2% and is at its lowest level since 5/14. Multifamily activity was up 19.9%,…

While the strength of the US dollar was for a long time the result of central bank policy in the US, the dollar is now, to at least some extent, a determinant of Fed policy. Because the surging dollar is dampening inflation, hurting exports, lowering corporate profits, and will probably harm developing nations with substantial…

After WWII, public transit use peaked at 23 billion unique trips, meaning that 20% of the US population took public transit twice a day. Public transit usage then quickly declined, hitting a low of 6.6 billion unique trips in 1972. In 2014 ridership probably hit 10.8 billion trips, which, while the highest level since 1956,…

Many stores offer low-price-match guarantees. On the surface this protects consumers. But it can harm them too. Once convinced that a store will match a lower price, customers may not shop around to find better prices. Moreover, if multiple stores offer a low-price-match, reduced prices won’t boost sales and the price-match becomes a form of…

Last Friday’s employment numbers were good, not great. 295,000 net new jobs is outstanding, and employment growth during the last year has been the best since 2000. Better yet, almost all the new jobs are in the private sector, almost all are full-time, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5%. But the labor force shrunk…

The Friday File: The cost of raising a child from birth to college is $245,340, or $13,630/year for families with annual incomes of $82,790. Of course this excludes college costs and forgone income while being a stay-at-home parent. Conservatively those two items sum to over $150,000, bringing the total cost/child to an eye-watering $395,000! No…

In Obama’s first term, 2.018 million private sector jobs were created. That total beats both of W’s terms, and Bush Sr.’s only term, but doesn’t come close to the over 10 million jobs created in each of Clinton’s terms. However, so far in Obama’s second term, 5.542 million jobs have been created. At this pace…

While 3.2 million new jobs were created in 2014 making it a great year for job creation, GDP grew by a very pedestrian 2.4%. This suggests that labor productivity is either growing very slowly, or worse, may be declining. Either way, it means when labor force slack disappears inflation pressures may quickly build, absent Fed…