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Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
In her address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on January 18th, Fed Chair Yellen referred to the U.S. economy as being near "maximum employment." Note that she did not say "full employment."
-According to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), more than 5.54 million jobs were open in January, a number that has been rising for more than a year. For the past 10 months, there have been fewer gross hires than job openings, a phenomenon unheard of before late 2015.
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
- A snapshot of the current state of the American economy looks like this: From July to September in 2016, the economy expanded at a 3.5 percent rate. That's the fastest expansion of the economy in the past two years. The Federal Reserve, which tracks the health of the American economy closely in order to make critical decisions affecting monetary policy, is so confident in the current pace of economic growth that it recently raised interest rates for just the second time in a decade
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
-there has been a reminder that monetary policy, which has dominated investors’ thoughts for much of the period 2008, still has the potential to have a big impact.
- The headline rate is expected to be 2%, although the core rate is forecast to be stable at 1.7%. The unemployment rate is 4.8% and wage growth has edged higher to 3.2%, although well below pre-2007 rates of increase.
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
What is “potential labor force?” It’s CBO’s estimate of what the labor force would be if the economy were at full capacity and the unemployment rate was at its “natural rate” (the lowest rate consistent with stable inflation). In order to project budget outlays and receipts, CBO needs to guesstimate various quantities in the economy, like employment, the labor force, unemployment, and average compensation
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
-The current 4.8 percent unemployment rate is reasonably low by any measure. While it can go somewhat lower, that will not allow for much further expansion of the economy.
-Those who insist that we are near full employment argue that this is pretty much the best we can do and that these drops are permanent. Those like myself, who think we can do much better, argue that we should be able to return to past rates of labor force participation rates (LFPR) among prime-age workers.
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
-relative to the average hourly wages of white men with the same education, experience, metro status, and region of residence, black men make 22.0 percent less, and black women make 34.2 percent less.
-the black unemployment rate today (7.8 percent) remains nearly twice as high as the white unemployment rate (4.3 percent). And, black workers can’t educate themselves out of racial disparities in labor market performance.
-the likelihood of doing better than your parents or climbing the economic ladder—is lower for African Americans than it is for whites.
Mar 9, 2017
Op-Ed
If the Fed does decide to neutralize a fiscal boost, American workers will be worse off. The job of the Fed should be to aggressively plumb the depths of how low unemployment can go without sparking wage and price inflation. They should not start pulling back on economic support before this inflation actually occurs.
Mar 2, 2017
Op-Ed
When we look at the well-being of families through this new lens, we discover that many middle- and lower-income families have experienced high rates of parental employment insecurity and income inequality since 2000, eight years before the Great Recession. The recession brought additional large increases in employment insecurity and income inequality for such families. By March 2015, children in middle- and lower-income remained at or above the already high levels of parental employment insecurity experienced in 2000. By the end of 2014, they had family incomes 10 percent to 22 percent below their historic peak in 2000.
Mar 1, 2017
Op-Ed
In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump stuck closely to his prepared remarks, but ran afoul of the facts in some cases.
Trump said the U.S. has spent $6 trillion in the Middle East and “with this $6 trillion we could have rebuilt our country.” The amount spent so far is $1.7 trillion, according to the Defense Department.
He cherry-picked the findings of a recent report, saying it found immigration costs U.S. taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.” The report said immigration “has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth.”
Trump said “94 million Americans are out of the labor force,” a figure that includes the retired, college students and stay-at-home parents. The vast majority — 88.5 million — said they didn’t want a job.
Trump said he would “promote clean air and clean water,” a vague claim that came hours after he had signed an executive order to roll back a 2015 “Clean Water Rule.”
And the president repeated claims we’ve fact-checked before on border security, welfare, job creation since he was elected, health insurance and crime. For instance, he said the U.S. left “our own borders wide open, for anyone to cross.” But the border patrol budget and number of agents have both doubled since 2001.
Mar 1, 2017
Op-Ed
As of January 2017, there were 94.4 million people classified as not being in the labor force, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. But as the Washington Post has noted, the total 94.4 million figure includes retirees, students, stay-at-home parents and people who are disabled — people who are not looking for a job… Just 7.6 million people are actually unemployed, according to the BLS.