Archive for September 2021

From the housing bust until the pandemic, home prices in neighborhoods within a 10- or 20-minute commute to the city center appreciated more quickly than more distant areas. Covid-19 has reversed that as people have moved further away yet almost always (think 95% or more) remained in the same metro area. Sars-Cov-2 has increased urban…

The CPI rose 0.9% M-o-M in June, 0.5% in July and just 0.3% in August. Similar Y-o-Y numbers show inflation declining from 4.5% in June to 4.2% in July and 4% in August, a nice decline! But, trimmed measures of inflation, which lop off items that increase the most and least to help reveal how…

In the years leading up to the 2008/09 Housing Bust, the monthly US trade deficit regularly hit $70 billion/month, or $840 billion/year. At the time, that was a whopping 6% of GDP. Now, the US trade deficit is running at a much higher record rate of $90 billion/month or $1.1 trillion/year. But the US economy…

Non-marital childbearing has increased significantly among women of all educational levels. Over the last quarter-century however, the largest increase is among college-educated women 32-38. In 1996, the percentage was 4%, today it is 24.5%. Among women 32-38 with only a high-school diploma the percentage giving birth to their first-born outside wedlock is 60%. For those…

The Friday File: The shortest city name in 28 states has three letters; in 17 states it has four letters. Here is where it gets interesting. In three states, CT (Derby), DE (Dover) and NH (Dover), the shortest city name has five characters, and in VT (Ludlow) it has six. But the winner, tiny Rhode…

177.4 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, 53.4% of the population. 40 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported. Assuming no one gets Covid-19 twice, that 53.4% of those testing positive for Covid-19 are vaccinated, and that reported cases are half of all cases, 215 million Americans, or 64.6%, have some Covid-19 protection. Assuming the…

The US Treasury will, unless the debt ceiling is raised, start running out of money around Halloween. The term of Fed Chairman Powell ends on 1/31/22. President Biden must realistically announce his decision before Thanksgiving. Lastly, Congress must pass a budget, or a continuing resolution by 10/1/21, the start of FY22, otherwise the government closes.…

The US Economy added 235,000 jobs in August, well below the 700,000 expected, but decent. Blame it on the Delta variant and labor shortages. The leisure and hospitality sector, which has averaged 350,000 new jobs/month through July, added none in August. However, this is also a supply problem. Employers are struggling to hire, to wit,…

The Friday File: Labor Day became an official national holiday on 6/28/1894 when President Cleveland signed a bill into law during the infamous and deadly Pullman strike. Back then, the work week was from Monday to Saturday and was 60-65 hours. By the 1920s the workweek fell to about 50 hours, and in 1940 Congress…

Financial markets are jittery about the Fed’s plans to taper its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, not so much because tapering itself is likely to raise rates, because it won’t. Rather, markets fear that the end of tapering will be quickly followed by increases in the fed funds rate, which is not necessarily…