The impact of AI and robots on employment has principally focused on the demand for labor.  The concern expressed by many is that AI and robots will reduce demand which might result in rising unemployment.  Overlooked in this forecast, however,…

Our view that December wage inflation was highly likely to surprise to the downside did not happen.  For only the second time since January 2015 a big gain in the year-ago month was exceeded in the current month.  Upward revisions…

There is at least one bright spot in the growing gloom regarding the outlook for global economic growth – the U.S. Consumer.  The improvement in the normal metrics of average hourly or weekly earnings understate consumer spending power because they…

  The smaller than expected increase in Average Hourly Earnings (AHE) for November (6 cents per hour versus anticipations of 7 cents per hour) increases the probability that December wage inflation to be released on January 4, 2019 will surprise…

Inflammatory language regarding immigrants can become especially heated when the topic shifts to unauthorized immigrants, sometimes derisively called “illegal aliens”.  They are a subset of our prior discussion which covered all foreign-born persons residing in the U.S.  As was true…

Inflammatory language regarding immigrants often dominates the discussion regarding the foreign-born population.  The basic narrative is that immigrants represent both a physical and economic threat to native-born Americans.  With regards to the physical threat, a recent study by the Hamilton…

  The outcome for wages was as we expected.  Average Hourly Earnings (AHE) increased by 3.1% year-on-year.  Scarcely mentioned was the fact that the uptick from 2.8% in September benefitted from October of last year being a depressed level.  Wage…

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) increased by 2.9% in the 12 months ended September, a very modest uptick from the 2.8% recorded in the 12 months ending in June.  The fact that wage inflation remains moderate even though the unemployment…

Are birth rates in highly developed economies low because many women have smaller families or are they low because a significant number of women have no live births, i.e. they are childless?  The answer to that question is important in…

The “preliminary” estimate of an increase of “only” 134,000 September payroll jobs in combination with the unemployment rate reaching a 40 year low of 3.7% prompted many commentators to state that labor market slack had evaporated because companies were finding…