Last week more numbers relating to the US job market and inflation descended on us. They were picked over, and those that suited some preconception were selected for highlighting. Useful, but a process removed from the real world of job creating, job hunting, supermarket shopping and politics. No debate about that real world. It is […]
The best of our forecasters put the probability of a recession next year at around 65 per cent. Inflation is wiping out the value of the wage increases generated by a tight labor market. Joe Biden’s administration is on a spending spree that has sent the national debt over the $30 trillion mark, and rising, […]
Now we know where the American economy is headed. More precisely, we now know where the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policymakers believe they are taking us. Chairman Powell has warned there will be pain to drive inflation out of the system, and he now offers the Fed’s view of just how much. Last week he […]
There is bad news coming from the battlefront. No, not the Ukraine-Russian front lines, where things seem to be going better than expected, at least for now. But from the battle between the Fed and the President. The Federal Reserve Board, fighting inflation, is hurling its fraction-of-one-per cent interest rate increases against the President’s trillions […]
Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go. Or not. For Americans the last day of summer is and always has been Labor Day, the first Monday of the month, this year September 5th. The following Monday traditionally has been the first post-summer day in the office. That day is today. It is […]
They came, they met, they gave speeches and today are headed home from their central bankers’ conclave in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They shared the latest reading from their models, crystal balls or chicken intestines. Leading the parade was Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Last year he declared that the […]
The American Economy has been unalterably altered. Last week President Biden signed into law the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). If not a new New Deal it certainly is what Biden likes to call a Big Deal. Not because the law will do anything to slow inflation. The effect on the inflation rate will […]
Climate change recently was pushed to the back burner by a host of more immediate concerns – gas prices, inflation, recession, crime, illegal immigration – and by a realization that the geopolitical and economic settlement following WW II is in tatters. But climate policy is once again a hot topic in the United States, and […]
The pedants have gone to war. The Federal Reserve Board announced Friday that inflation as it measures it is rising at an annual rate of 6.8 percent, a 40-year high and more than three times the Fed’s 2 percent target. Ordinary folk stocking up on food say the rate they face is closer to 10 […]
Just when we thought May’s year-over-year 8.6 percent jump in inflation was as bad as it could get, the June Consumer Price Index clocked in at an eye-watering 9.1 percent. Gasoline (+59.9 percent), air fares (+34.1), household energy (+21.9), furniture (+13.1) and groceries (+12.2) led the parade. And while the ink was still wet on […]