Viewpoints: 2020

As difficult it was to decide to shut down large segments of the economy in order to contain coronavirus it will be even trickier to decide when to end the lockdown. News that the coronavirus curve (i.e., the number of cases) may be [...]

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank has issued estimates of state coincident indexes for February. This is essentially the last comprehensive snapshot of the distribution of activity prior to the impact of the pandemic. A look at [...]

The March employment report shows massive disruption in the labor market triggered by the coronavirus. And as awful as the payroll job loss numbers appear they pale in comparison to the record loss in household employment and surge in [...]

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank has issued estimates of state coincident indexes for January. These indexes now take into account the annual labor market benchmark revisions. Additionally, movements in proprietors’ income are [...]

State labor markets were generally sound in February, prior to the onset of the pandemic. Texas led the way, with a 50,400 (.4%) rise in payrolls—tops in the absolute gain and trailing only Alaska in percentage change. Michigan and [...]

Government restrictions to contain coronavirus have caused tremendous economic damage compelling some to question is it worth "destroying the economy by trying to save it"? This is not the first time government restrictions triggered [...]

BEA has released the first estimates of state personal income for the fourth quarter of 2019 and for 2019 as a whole. Right now interest in these figures may be mostly antiquarian. For 2019 as a whole, the fastest-growing states were [...]

Economic recession is an infrequent occurrence, but in a fundamental sense recessions are the economy's way of cleansing the "rot" out the system that have been built up over time. This emanates from bad investments, bad loans, bad [...]