Inflation & the Labor Market since 2020: Q: A Successful "Soft Landing"? A: How would it look different if it were not? Note: Grasping Reality supplies information about sandwiches for omnivore...
The one slide in here that I find perhaps less useful than an alternative measure: For housing, you specifically have chosen "new single family homes sold". It seems clear that in fact we _should not_ be building (and then selling) so many SFHs as we used to, because there is very little undeveloped land for new SFHs in the places where we ought to be building homes (e.g. the city of San Francisco and the inner-ring suburbs of same). So you really should be measuring total production of new housing square footage, or "units", or bedrooms, or _something_ like that. (I always find "unit count" kind of annoying because it doesn't distinguish between a studio and a 3BR family apartment.)
My understanding is that production of units is up, although not by nearly enough yet.
When will there be transcripts/the papers that were delivered. It's not fair that I can only take pot shots at Brad for what HE puts up. He's not even a good target, hardly wrong enough to bother.
Surprise inflation" It took the Fed by surprise, too. The policy issue is when should the Fed have started raising interest rates? At least in hindsight it seems that September 2021 when TIPS finally reached and began to exceed the target looks right to me.
Rubber on the road. If this means. is the outcome of the Powell Fed 2021022 better than the Bernanke Fed 2009-10 (you only get to chose one!), yes of course. But that is an incredibly low bar. It's better to accelerate to highway speed w/o leaving ANY rubber on the road.
Right now, we have a number of unresolved social tensions reflected in the economy. Some examples: housing shortage, trailing middle and professional wages, commercial real estate seeing fractions of previous occupancy. The current interest rate environment isn't going to allow for much lubricant for any transitions, so there's going to be pain *somewhere* in the economy for these to resolve, the question becomes who bears the brunt of that pain.
If the "soft landing" is real any attempt to make workers bear it, such as forcing them back to unaffordable homes to work in person while denying raises, will backfire as workers just move to more productive firms and/or organize to see their lives improve.
If instead one of those or any of several dozen unsaid and unknown issues grows larger and *snaps* causing a recession within a couple of years, once again erasing personal economic gains for many, people won't remember it as a "landing" just because inflation was in the sorta right range for a year or two.
I'll wait for the transcript. Video/audio is fine for passive reception of information ("History of Rome") but not for something where you want to stop at some point and say, "What?" I agree that it's a good way for the participants to engage each other in near real time.
The one slide in here that I find perhaps less useful than an alternative measure: For housing, you specifically have chosen "new single family homes sold". It seems clear that in fact we _should not_ be building (and then selling) so many SFHs as we used to, because there is very little undeveloped land for new SFHs in the places where we ought to be building homes (e.g. the city of San Francisco and the inner-ring suburbs of same). So you really should be measuring total production of new housing square footage, or "units", or bedrooms, or _something_ like that. (I always find "unit count" kind of annoying because it doesn't distinguish between a studio and a 3BR family apartment.)
My understanding is that production of units is up, although not by nearly enough yet.
When will there be transcripts/the papers that were delivered. It's not fair that I can only take pot shots at Brad for what HE puts up. He's not even a good target, hardly wrong enough to bother.
Surprise inflation" It took the Fed by surprise, too. The policy issue is when should the Fed have started raising interest rates? At least in hindsight it seems that September 2021 when TIPS finally reached and began to exceed the target looks right to me.
Rubber on the road. If this means. is the outcome of the Powell Fed 2021022 better than the Bernanke Fed 2009-10 (you only get to chose one!), yes of course. But that is an incredibly low bar. It's better to accelerate to highway speed w/o leaving ANY rubber on the road.
Saw it online. Useful discussion. Learnt some new things. Thanks to the panel. Justin's analogy for wage bargaining/conflict theory was funny.
A crash without casualties will look almost indistinguishable from a soft landing.
A "soft landing" is only confirmed when the economy takes off again.
If we did indeed land softly, it's not in the softness of data but in the health and robustness of the data in the next economic boom.
Could you spell that out a bit?
Right now, we have a number of unresolved social tensions reflected in the economy. Some examples: housing shortage, trailing middle and professional wages, commercial real estate seeing fractions of previous occupancy. The current interest rate environment isn't going to allow for much lubricant for any transitions, so there's going to be pain *somewhere* in the economy for these to resolve, the question becomes who bears the brunt of that pain.
If the "soft landing" is real any attempt to make workers bear it, such as forcing them back to unaffordable homes to work in person while denying raises, will backfire as workers just move to more productive firms and/or organize to see their lives improve.
If instead one of those or any of several dozen unsaid and unknown issues grows larger and *snaps* causing a recession within a couple of years, once again erasing personal economic gains for many, people won't remember it as a "landing" just because inflation was in the sorta right range for a year or two.
Darn! I wish you had advertised this earlier; I would've driven. Will see online.
I'll wait for the transcript. Video/audio is fine for passive reception of information ("History of Rome") but not for something where you want to stop at some point and say, "What?" I agree that it's a good way for the participants to engage each other in near real time.
True, you infinite centrist you. :)
Print is truly a magical medium for those of us attuned to it...