By Jared Bernstein
August 24, 2014I yield to no one in my admiration for the careful, thoughtful, and reality-based economics practiced by Fed Chair Janet Yellen. So I was taken aback a bit by a section in her Jackson Hole speech on Friday.
It was the part where she gave a number of reasons why the absence of wage pressures may not, paradoxically, be signaling that considerable slack remains in the job market, and therefore, may not be signalling that the Fed should wait on raising rates to stave off faster inflation. Continue reading Jared Bernstein: Chair Yellen Looks Under New Rocks, Finds Same Thing that’s Under Old Rocks
Category Archives: Economics
Cyclical vs. Structural: Bivens and Shierholz Turn Over Every Stone to Find Out | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
By Jared Bernstein
As central bankers gather for their annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a top agenda item is evaluating the current and future amount of slack in the US economy. In this regard, they’d be well advised to check out this new study from the two economists at the Economic Policy Institute which provides an exhaustive examination of the issue.
Jared Bernstein: Has the Beveridge Curve Really Shifted? |
By Jared Bernstein
August 13th, 2014
August 13th, 2014
The Beveridge Curve (BC) is a favorite tool of labor economists showing the inverse relationship between job openings and unemployment. It’s thus a kind of index of strength of labor demand: when the job market is tight, there’s low unemployment and more unfilled openings/job vacancies, and vice versa.
Continue reading Jared Bernstein: Has the Beveridge Curve Really Shifted? |
The Federal Reserve Is Telling Us The Economy Is Pitiful
Shahien Nasiripourand
08/07/2014
Fewer than one-third of Americans report being better off financially than they were five years ago, with weak household savings and hefty debt burdens holding back large segments of the economy, according to a new Federal Reserve survey. Continue reading The Federal Reserve Is Telling Us The Economy Is Pitiful
Still No Wage Pressures to Speak Of…And Yet, People Speak of Them… | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
August 9th, 2014
I don’t plan to publish this wage mash-up every quarter, but given the building and misguided pressure on the Fed to start raising rates to prevent allegedly incipient wage and price inflation, I thought I’d update the previous quarter’s result through the first half of this year.
Rahm Emanuel Cuts Schools, Pensions While Preserving Fund For Corporate Subsidies
Months after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said budget constraints forced him to push for pension cuts and mass school closures, an analysis of government documents reveals the city has $1.71 billion in special accounts often used to finance corporate subsidies. While the Emanuel administration has rejected open records requests for details of the subsidies, evidence suggests at least some of them have flowed to companies connected to Emanuel’s campaign donors.
The analysis conducted by the TIF Illumination Project evaluated the city’s 151 tax increment financing, or TIF, districts, which divert a share of property taxes out of accounts obligated to schools and into special accounts under the mayor’s control.
Continue reading Rahm Emanuel Cuts Schools, Pensions While Preserving Fund For Corporate Subsidies
America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, these financial institutions draw the most complaints.
| Tue Jul. 29, 2014
If you put out a complaint box for customers of US banks and financial firms, you will get hundreds of thousands of complaints. That’s what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was set up by Elizabeth Warren before she became a US senator—has discovered. And the bank that has drawn the most complaints is Bank of America. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank were other top targets of consumer wrath.
Continue reading America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones
Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR
By Molly Roberts
When Leanne Brown moved to New York from Canada to earn a master’s in food studies at New York University, she couldn’t help noticing that Americans on a tight budget were eating a lot of processed foods heavy in carbs.
“It really bothered me,” she says. “The 47 million people on food stamps — and that’s a big chunk of the population — don’t have the same choices everyone else does.” Continue reading Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR
David Cay Johnston: Truths and myths about the rise of part-time #jobs | Al Jazeera America
Aggregate demand is the problem, not ‘Obamacare’
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 288,000 jobs had been added in June, critics cried foul. They said the news was misleading: The details showed a deteriorating job market, which many critics blamed on the Affordable Care Act requirement that employers provide workers with health insurance or risk prosecution or penalties.
But an examination of the data tells an entirely different story about what has hobbled the recovery from the Great Recession, which started in December 2007 and ended in the summer of 2009.
3 Reasons Subsidized Jobs Should Be Part of an Economic Mobility Agenda | Center for American Progress
By Rachel West |
The House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee is holding a hearing today on subsidized employment as a tool for boosting economic security. It is high time for Congress to re-examine the evidence on subsidized jobs and to discuss the potential this approach may hold for alleviating our country’s continuing unemployment woes and connecting disadvantaged workers to job opportunities.