Employment

Last week in this space Atlas noted the dramatic revisions to employment figures originally published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Click here to revisit it.

Our nation is in the midst of history.  We are under 80 days from the next election, including that of the future President of the United States.  Campaigns are in full swing, and so is story telling.  History is being told with a bit of revisionist flair, not unlike prior campaigns filled with promises and less-than-accurate recollections of earlier accomplishments.

More is an American mantra.  When we line up for the all-you-can eat buffet, we want more.  When it comes to consumption, we’re the nation responsible for the bumper stick that reads, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”  More, as a concept, is endemic in the nation’s culture and doesn’t seem to be becoming unrooted. 

A few days ago, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, was interviewed by Bloomberg radio, and I happened to be listening.  In the interview, he referenced a dark matter metaphor used by John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  Atlas searched for the speech or interview in which Mr.

Employment data have been rather consistent during the past year or so and could be setting up the Federal Reserve for a period of difficulty.  Growing payrolls have been the trend every month since December 2020.  The year-over-year statistic has been above zero since April 2021.  Although, it has also been decelerating since then (see the chart above), partly due to the law of

Software runs our world.  Whatever apparatus you’re reading this note on has programs and operating systems which allow you to receive and delete (hopefully not too quickly) this note.  Some of the code runs in the background doing things I’ll never understand, but other parts of it create feature or functionality designed to be useful to us as users.  Occasionally, a

Econometrics is a study of economic systems using statistical methods. Bored yet?  It uses mathematical models to describe the behavior of an economy.  Most of the time a system behaves in some sort of trending pattern.  Every once in a while, however, there is sufficient change in the pattern which gets described as a structural break.

People of notoriety are often given the opportunity to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game.  As you can see in this video which highlights some of the worst throws, the sixty-foot toss is harder than the professionals make it look.  Similarly, economists throw out projections each month, anticipating the outco

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

America’s labor situation has been one of the economy’s highlights since it began recovering after the Great Recession.  Last year (2019) ended the decade by adding 2.11 million net new jobs, including December’s uptick of 145,000 according the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  The unemployment rate held steady at 3.5 percent.