Joblessness and the Fed
“Without a symmetric response to deviations from the target, the Fed’s so-called average inflation target will not produce 2 percent inflation on average. Instead, it will tend to produce inflation that exceeds 2 percent. That’s a far cry from price stability.” ~ Alexander William Salter
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Reducing Unemployment Is Not a Free Lunch
“Every attempt by government to ‘stimulate the economy’ intensifies employers’ and workers’ expectations that slowing sales and losses of jobs will be cured by government-engineered increases in aggregate demand.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Understanding Unemployment
“The real impact of recession is felt directly on the unemployed and their families, in lost income, lost opportunities, and a host of social problems, including impaired mental health, domestic violence, and substance abuse.” ~ Robert F. Mulligan
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Is This What Monetary Tightening Looks Like?
“When will the Federal Reserve begin to unwind its balance sheet this time? If the meeting minutes indicate the trajectory of policy, reductions will begin within the next two years.” ~ James L. Caton
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Americans Don’t Hate Work, They Hate the Workplace
“We can build alternative institutions and parallel economies that create opportunities for hard-working Americans who won’t be pushed around.” ~ Austin Stone
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The Costly but Deliberate U.S. Labor Shortage
“Today’s U.S. labor shortage is both uneconomic and unnecessary, yet nonetheless what appears to be a deliberate policy aim. Sadly, the same can be said about a wide range of other anti-capitalist policies being advanced by the Biden administration.” ~ Richard M. Salsman
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Dangerous Demographics in the Monthly Labor Summary
“We’re outside the range of the ‘full employment’ unemployment rate. The economy is, as many people sense, not as good as the official statistics say.” ~ Clifford F. Thies
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The Great Reconsideration
“If not merely a response to what has been a confusing, stressful, and financially challenging year-and-a-half, the Great Reconsideration of work, life, and self-actualization is likely to resonate vastly beyond the coming months.” ~ Peter C. Earle
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Lumber, Labor, and Gas Markets Tell SAD Stories
“As economists emphasize whenever price gouging rules kick in, ignoring what supply and demand analysis has to teach us usually means making the problem worse rather than better.” ~ Art Carden
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Setting the Table for Covid-X
“Covid-19 struck a robust, arguably healthy economy; a less productive, more heavily-indebted, higher tax economy awaits Covid-X.” ~ Peter C. Earle
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Unemployment in Free vs. Locked-Down States
“States like New York and California, where millions have been driven into financial ruin, imposed top-down draconian measures in order to ‘stop the spread.’ They have only registered significantly worse outcomes, on both a disease burden front in addition to the ruinous economic and societal side effects of lockdowns. Not a single top-down restriction supposedly intended to ‘stop the spread’ did anything statistically demonstrable to quell the virus problem.” ~ Jordan Schachtel
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Can We Talk About Something Else Now?
“We might, as the protesters I heard on the radio, remember that other things matter too, that one type of risk must be balanced by the harms of another, that risk-mitigating policies be proportionate to the damage, that few things warrant the wholesale closing of commerce and civil society.” ~ Joakim Book
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