Weekly Economic Update 4/23: American Businesses Are Investing in Greater Productivity
The Business Roundtable’s 2018-Q1 survey reports that 68% of business leaders expect that their company’s capital spending will be higher over the next 6 months—the highest in the survey’s 15-year history. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act helped to raise these expectations by both lowering tax rates and al...
Stock Buybacks are Great for Working Americans
The good news keeps coming from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA): companies continue to award workers bonuses, pay raises, better benefits, and provide more job training; employers are adding new jobs; investment and manufacturing are moving back to the United States; utility bills are lower; and bu...
Some Good News from CBO’s 2018 Budget and Economic Outlook
Today, Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, criticized the Congressional Budget Office as "always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly because they don't understand the growth, the incentives and the encouragements to reward success." Neverth...
Weekly Economic Update 4/16: CBO Raises Job Growth Projection by 2.6 Million
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects 156.8 million jobs in America by year-end 2027—2.6 million more jobs than in its June 2017 Budget and Economic Outlook. CBO attributes an average of 1.1 million additional jobs over the next 10 years to the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The Geography of Social Capital in America
Social capital is almost surely an important factor driving many of our nation’s greatest successes and most serious challenges. Indeed, the withering of associational life is itself one of those challenges. Public policy solutions to such challenges are inherently elusive. But at present, policymak...
March 2018 Jobs Review
103,000 were created in March following a very large increase of 326,000 in February, adjustments for seasonal variation and bad weather may explain the low jobs number, and the uenmployment rate (U-3) has held at 4.1% for 6 consecutive months, the lowest since 2000.
Weekly Economic Update 4/9: “You are better off now than you were 15 months ago”
Smoothing monthly variations, the three-month moving average shows that between 2015 and January 2017, weekly earnings growth slowed to 2%. Since then, as regulatory reform and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded economic potential for Americans, weekly earnings growth has accelerated to 3%.
Weekly Economic Update: Real GDP Growth Revised Upward--Again!
Fourth-quarter GDP growth has been revised up from 2.5 to 2.9% by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Weekly Economic Update: March 26 - March 30
New orders for capital goods have risen briskly since the last election, which suggests an end to stagnating business capital investment. Greater business investment in machines and tools, enables workers to become more productive. This sets the stage for sustainable economic and wage growth.
March 2018 FOMC Review
The Fed raised its key monetary policy rate, the interest on excess reserves (IOER) rate, to 1.75%. The rate hike comes despite no signs of overheating and inflation remaining below the Fed’s 2% target. However, Fed projections for a year-end 2018 IOER rate of 2.25% remained unchanged.
