Viewpoints: August 2018

Last Wednesday the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank issued its estimates of state coincident activity for July. All 50 states report increases over the last 12 months; only West Virginia and Alaska showed gains under 1 percent. As [...]

At a cabinet meeting last week, White House economic advisor Mr. Larry Kudlow described the economy's performance in 2018 as a "genuine economic boom." Yet, Mr. Kudlow failed to mention that this "economic boom" is being accompanied [...]

July saw job gains in 42 states, though only 6 of those increases were deemed statistically significant by BLS, led by California’s 46,700 (0.3 percent) gain (Nevada had the largest percentage increase—0.7). It’s often the case that a [...]

The Mortgage Bankers' Association's latest numbers on home mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures show that problems with home loans continue to fade. At the end of the second quarter, 1.05 percent of all mortgages on 1 to 4-unit [...]

One of the great economic mysteries of the past 20 years has been the lack of cyclical pressure in core consumer price inflation. The answers to this mystery are far from being merely academic since the stance of monetary policy is [...]