Archive for November 2021

Compared to 1/1/19, inflation-adjusted US purchases of services has fully recovered, great news. The problem: purchases of goods remain up by almost 20%! Apparently, Covid-19 habits die hard. The US economy is not suffering from anything resembling stagflation. Rather, we are seeing very strong growth bumping up against supply constraints exacerbated by a profound worker…

The Friday File: It turns out that, on average, we are more likeable than we think we are. The Liking Gap was first demonstrated in 2018. Researchers randomly paired persons for five-minute conversations after which each participant was asked to rate how much they liked the other and how much they thought the other liked…

Montana and Virginia are the states with the highest percentage of veterans among their civilian population over 18, at over 10%! States with 8.0%-9.9% and going from west to east are WA, NV, ID, AZ, WY, NM, CO, ND, SD, OK, MO, AR, TN, AL, FL, WV, SC, DE, NH and ME. We owe a…

As measured by the CPI, October inflation rose 6.2% Y-o-Y, the fastest pace since 1990 and the fifth month in a row above 5%. Similarly, core-inflation rose 4.6% Y-o-Y, its largest move since 1991. Inflation is rising rapidly because demand has fully recovered while supply hasn’t, causing supply-chains to break down. With Christmas shopping upon…

Apartment developers are on track in 2021 to create 20,100 new multifamily units from old office, hotel, and retail buildings, more than any time since 2010 and well up from the 2017 post housing-bust peak of 15,000. Currently, 41% of the conversions are, interestingly, in former office buildings, and not hotels, owing to urban demand…

US employers added 531,000 jobs in October. Moreover, the lousy months of August and September were upwardly revised by 235,000, leaving the jobs number just 18.6%, or 4.2 million, below its pre-Covid-19 high. Unfortunately, the labor force grew by just 104,000 and the labor force participation remains stuck at 61.6%, down from 63.3% in 2/20.…

The Friday File: In 2019, 127 billion metal cans were manufactured in the US, up 1.5% from 2018. 76% were for beverages, 24% were for canned food. In 2018, 22.7% of consumed vegetables were canned, down from a peak of 31.7% in 1971. Pull-tab cans were invented in 1964 and Bell canning jars celebrated their…

In 2/20, the month before Covid-19, real personal income (including wages, bonuses, rents, dividends, royalties, and interest payments) excluding government monies (such as stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, social security and so on) was $14.23 trillion. In 9/21, the latest month for which there is data, the number was $14.22 trillion and slowly rising. This suggests…

To the surprise of nobody, the Fed announced that tapering at the rate of $15 billion/month will soon start. The mild surprise, tapering will start this month and will thus probably end in June. This expedited start to tapering will give the Fed more time between the end of tapering and the start of rate…

Raising taxes is difficult, the Democrats have made it unnecessarily hard. They should have begun treating carried interest as regular income because that’s what it is, not capital gains. They could have also eliminated stepped-up basis at death by explaining that SUB allows capital gains taxes to never be paid. Lastly, taxing firms on the…