Viewpoints: 2018

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 [...]

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's first test of deciding over the proper stance and course of monetary policy has arrived. Back in February when Mr. Powell testified before Congress he said one of the more important factors [...]

On Wednesday July 25 BLS released its Q4 report on Business Employment Dynamics: gross job gains and losses. As always, this rather neglected (perhaps because it is released with such a lag) report adds nuance to the regular job data. [...]

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s state coincident indexes show some dispersion in growth across the nation. Since June 2017, comparable to the payroll employment numbers, growth has apparently been most rapid in the West, with New [...]

A lively debate has broken out over the narrowing of the yield curve, or the spread between short and long-term Treasury yields. In fact, some Federal Reserve officials have stated that they might want to stop raising official rates [...]

The June data on jobs by state show at best modest changes from May levels. Only 5 states (Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Tennessee) saw gains that BLS deemed to be statistically significant. The majority of [...]

President Trump has stated “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” The problem with that statement is that foreign [...]