Archive for August 2018

July’s net job growth of 157,000 was solid, especially considering the closure of Toys “R” Us, which resulted in 32,000 job losses in hobby and game stores. May and June were substantially revised up, the broadest measure of unemployment hit 7.5%, its lowest level since 5/01, while headline unemployment fell to 3.9%, its second-best reading…

The Friday File: Looking only at native speakers, the most spoken language in the world is Chinese with 1.3 billion first-language speakers. A distant second is Spanish with almost 440 million speakers. English is third with 372 million native speakers, and Arabic follows with 295 million. In fifth is Hindi at 260 million, then Bengali…

At the beginning of 2018, one US dollar was worth about 41,000 Iranian rials. By the time President trump pulled the US out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, the exchange rate was 60,000 rials/dollar and now it is 120,000 rials/dollar. Inflation is over 100%/year, social unrest is on the rise, and while 190,000 undocumented Afghan…

Last Thursday Facebook lost $119 billion, 19% of its market value, after predicting slowing revenue growth in the remainder of 2018. It was the largest one-day dollar decline for a US company ever, ahead of Intel’s $90 drop in 4/00. This decline was equal to the GDP of Kuwait or Morocco. The largest one-day decline…