Viewpoints: 2020

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 [...]

In May, the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) released two surveys on manufacturing. The message is bleak; the contraction in activity remains sharp and firms expect a record decline in revenues and capital expenditures for 2020. [...]

The April results for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's state coincident indexes were as horrid as one would expect. Only 4 states (Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and Nebraska) had one-month declines smaller than 10 percent [...]

The Fed's debt-bridge policy is designed to improve the flow of credit to businesses to avoid a devastating credit crunch. Never before has one of the monetary policy solutions to combat recession been to extend credit to struggling, [...]

The debacle was complete. All 50 states (and DC) experienced statistically significant declines in payroll employment and statistically significant increases in their unemployment rate in April. 43 states saw new record highs in [...]