The increase in the AIER Everyday Price Index (EPI) has moderated to 0.5 percent in April (roughly 6 percent on an annualized basis) from 1.9 percent in March. During the 12 months ending in April, the index increased 2.8 percent, as compared with 9.3 percent over the same period last year. All numbers are before seasonal adjustments and so reflect prices as actually experienced by the public....
High growth in the emerging economy’s service sector offers lessons for the U.S.
Unlike China, which relies heavily on manufacturing to boost its economy, India has based much of its growth on service industry exports.
The strategy has worked well for the other Asian giant. In 2010 alone, India’s growth was more than three times that of the United States, with gross domestic...
Productivity gains are making manufacturing in the U.S. more attractive. Policy shifts and improved education could speed a comeback.
Manufacturing is no longer the lynchpin it once was in the United States economy. Although about 9 percent of Americans currently work in the field, increased offshoring over the past few decades has diminished industry as a source of employment. In 2010, China...
Overtime and temporary employment increase as the tab for health care makes businesses balk at adding permanent jobs.
To accommodate the growing population and begin making up for the millions of jobs lost during the recession, the U.S. economy needs to add at least 200,000 jobs a month. This isn’t happening. In March, the economy added 120,000 jobs, a substantially smaller increase than...
A healthy 25-year-old purchases a $250,000 life insurance policy. He pays $110,100 in premiums over the next 40 years. Between age 65 and 80, he withdraws a total of $314,475. At age 80, he still has $63,121 of cash value and a death benefit of $178,935.
How is all this possible? The answer is permanent life insurance.
Many people opt for term life insurance while their children are in college or...
Warmer weather brings out bursting flowers, chirping birds and... consumers? The last one may be a little harder to gauge.
Balmy weather in the first quarter of 2012 had people shopping for new wardrobe items. But when chilly weather set in, they pulled back.
The International Council of Shopping Centers reports April U.S. chain-store sales rose by 0.6% on a year-over-year basis. It attributes the flat number to an earlier Easter this year than last (April 8 vs. April 28) and abnormally warm weather in March that pulled demand forward.
McMillanDoolittle's Anne Brouwer, senior...
By Craig Richardson
On March 14 of this year, Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith stunned Wall Street with a public resignation letter, explaining why he could no longer work there. He described in detail the “toxic and...
When U.K. subscriber John M. wrote in this week, he got right to the point.
Asked John: "What's happening to gold prices? Why are they dropping?"
For an answer, I speed-dialed Real Asset Returns Editor Peter Krauth - our resident expert on mining and precious metals.
Peter is based in Canada, which keeps him close to the natural-...
Consumers wondering why they don't have any money in their pockets to buy dog food at the same time the government is telling them inflation remains tame needn't worry about their sanity.
As the Labor Department gets ready to report on the consumer-price index for March on Friday, the American Institute for Economic Research is cautioning that "everyday prices" for such things as food, fuel and prescription drugs are skyrocketing.
The think tank estimates that consumer inflation, as ......
The economy's been growing at a rate less than half the average for the recoveries following the nine previous postwar recessions. Accompanying the worst recovery ever is the longest period of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression, the Congressional Budget Office has noted.
Real average hourly earnings fell 1.1 percent between February of last year and this February, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Americans are being squeezed more than these data indicate. The Consumer Price Index rose just 2.9 percent last year, but the...
England's famous Mr. Bean (not THAT Mr. Bean although sometimes one wonders), Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, has once again, opened his oral orifice and waxed philosophical about the state of the economy. Recently, he gave a speech to the Scottish Council for Development and Industry in which he pontificated about the Bank of England's program of quantitative easing and how what an unmitigated success it has been, in fact, it has been so successful that the Bank has had to...Many economists have spent a great deal of time trying to understand why, despite prodding from both the Federal government and Federal Reserve, the American economic "recovery" has been tepid at best. In an article entitled "The Housing Trap" by Dr. Zinna Mukherjee, Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, the author explains how the upsurge in home ownership in America led to reduced savings rates and has ultimately led to a deepening of the Great Recession....
Price momentum is a key component of chart analysis. Traders commonly look for stocks moving in a certain direction or signs that the direction of a stock’s price is about to change. The idea is that momentum is a trader’s friend, if it can properly be identified and analyzed.
The argument against price momentum is that price movements are random. Share prices, many argue, adjust quickly to reflect new information, and new information cannot be predicted. Thus, trend analysis does not lead to improved long-term performance.
A study recently published...
It's time for the Fed to fight inflation.
After all, that's supposed to be Job No. 1, now that the specter of financial crisis has passed. Inflation is already running above the Fed's 2% target, and one-year consumer inflation expectations have jumped to 4%.
Inflation is nowhere as visible as at the fuel pump, where gasoline prices have returned to their 2011 highs and are a mere 20 cents from their 2008 all-time peak. (See the chart below...
The big problem for President Obama in November may turn out to be the misery index, which combines the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. When it reaches double digits, incumbents generally don't do too well. At 8.3% the unemployment rate is probably not going to surprise on the upside between now and November. It may even go down a bit. But the other component of the misery index, inflation, is more likely to rise than fall.
Inflation...
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