Unemployment And Inflation -- For The Archives -- October, 2024

Locator: 44349JOBS.

For the archives. I've lost interest in this metric, also. The official unemployment rate is U-3. The unemployment rate on which I focus, U-1. We've discussed it before. U-1 is the simplest, unadjusted, straightforward. One number: 15 weeks. .

Seriously, is there any significant difference between 1.4% and 1.6%? 

I'm sure it's neither significant nor reproducible. A statistician might have the equations to "prove" the change is significant, but it's not significant to you or me.

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Inflation 

I haven't read the article yet, just the headline, but after posting this note, I'll read the article. 

The headline suggests that too many "smart" people are/were "over-thinking" things. With regard to inflation, they're still over-thinking it. It's all about supply / demand. 

The price of eggs had nothing to do with the $40-trillion US debt. It had to do with bird flu and the culling of chickens. 

So, now I'll read the article. LOL.

Link here. 

President Biden hadn’t even been inaugurated when he and his senior advisers made a monumental gamble in January 2021 that would reverberate through his presidency. Fresh on the heels of a $900 billion Covid-relief bill that Congress had approved weeks earlier, Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.

Biden and many of those advisers had been part of the Obama administration. Barack Obama took office under similarly gloomy circumstances in January 2009, during the low point of the global financial crisis. Years of high unemployment followed, with much of the world mired in a trap of low growth and very low—even negative—interest rates.

One lesson Democrats took from that episode: Spend aggressively when interest rates are low. It is better to overfill the cup than underfill it. 

It's a long article. It's amazing how much the writer had to write to explain it. Nick Timiraos isn't over-thinking it. He has it right, but for all the writing he did, he failed to come out and say it simply: inflation was a result of the mismatch in supply and demand. 

If one accepts that, it's easy to come up with the solution that the Biden administration failed to see. Folks in the administration over-thought it and Biden / Harris were poor communicators.