On Friday, October 28, three interesting data releases came out that may further complicate the FOMC’s decision process at its November meeting. First, we got the reading on PCE for the month of September, which is up 0.2 percentage points from 4.2% in August to 4.4% in September. This increase…

We get a lot of questions about Florida. So we thought we would recommend a book that friends Carla and Pete suggested to us.

Faced with continued inflationary pressures far above the FOMC’s 2% target, a strong labor market but one that is far from what might be considered full employment, and an economy growing at somewhere in the 2% range in the past couple of months, should the FOMC start tapering…

Chinese authorities have urged (we don’t know what “urge” means) Evergrande’s founder, Hui Ka Yan, to use his personal funds to help pay Evergrande’s debt obligations. Other Chinese companies have been advised to prepare to meet payments due on their offshore bonds as well.…

A fishing buddy and longtime friend, Danny Blanchflower, is Professor of Economics at Dartmouth. His collaborator Alex Bryson is Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, University College, London. Together these two economists have been looking at the predictive…

We have written recently about the jobs situation in the United States. See “Jobs, Wages, the Outlook?” https://www.cumber.com/market-commentary/jobs-wages-outlook. We expect the employment picture to worsen, which means continuing upward pressure on wages and continuing shortages of labor…

Readers have been asking about our view of the economic recovery and the labor force. We are receiving mixed signals from economic data, and the bottom-line answer is uncertain. Let’s get to details and some suggested readings and end with my personal view.

A number of readers have asked us about the Mu variant of COVID, and we’ve had several recent conference calls and Zoom meetings on the subject. Those conversations have actually focused on two variants, Mu and R.1. So far, neither variant has posed as serious a threat as Delta has.

The increase in Delta infections put a damper on the return to normalcy in the third quarter. Areas that had seen an increase in economic activity, including transit systems and air travel, saw reductions.

Nearly all the world and certainly all the major economies in the developed countries are taking their interest rate trends flat to higher. While they are moving individually and each of them is focused on domestic economic data, they are still a group acting in concert; and that is the concern…