Viewpoints

European financial markets welcomed the news earlier this week that June's flash purchasing managers indices for the Eurozone and the UK had recovered much of the ground that they lost in April and May. The headline composite index [...]

The first quarter personal income data reflected the initial impact of the pandemic. Two travel and tourism-heavy states, Hawaii and Nevada, were quite weak, with annual growth rates of -0.1 percent (Hawaii) and 1.0 percent (Nevada). [...]

May's improvement in the labor market varied across the nation. While 38 states (including D.C.) experienced statistically significant declines in their unemployment rates (led by an astonishing 5.7 percentage point plunge in [...]

Mr. Cohen criticized my article of June 8, BLS Failed Its Mandate: "Fearless Publication of the Facts", stating my arguments were "exaggerated, misleading, and inaccurate". Let me respond to Mr. Cohen's key points. First, the data in [...]

The Monthly Treasury Statement for May showed federal withheld income tax receipts falling a record 33% from the comparable period one year ago. The decline in May tax receipts exceeds the 30% decline in April. Monthly tax (gross) [...]

Many economists are now looking to non-traditional real-time data sources to get a bearing on the economic temperature. That's partly because of the normal lags that exist between the period to which traditional data sources pertain [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) first commissioner Mr. Carroll D. Wright described the agency mandate, "Fearless Publication of the Facts". By its admission, BLS failed to live up to its mandate as it published two employment [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the jobless rate fell 1.4 percentage points to 13.3%. The May numbers bettered consensus expectations by the largest margin in history as analysts (including me) expected the jobless [...]