Salient to Investors: Nicholas Colas at ConvergEx said participation in SNAP is a distress indicator so its recent decline suggests the recovery is benefiting more Americans. Russell Price at Ameriprise Financial said many low-income households are seeing modest tailwinds as several states have increased minimum wage and the federal level
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Michael Bryan at FRB of Atlanta said restaurant menu prices do not change as often as many other goods and services so increases signal restaurant owners see inflation rising as sticky prices give a much better idea of future inflation. The sticky CPI, which only includes items
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics said: The 1.3 million private-sector jobs created in half1 2014 paid an average of $867 a week versus $843 per week for the existing 117 million private-sector jobs. Mining, construction and business-services companies – which traditionally pay more than the average – are increasingly
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: European countries including the UK, Denmark and Switzerland are enacting policies to stem housing bubbles, yet with German mortgage volumes at the highest in 16 years, Germans are taking out smaller home loans and repaying them faster as prudent borrowers and lenders bet that record-low interest rates
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat writes: Americans have come up with better ways to teach math but have failed to implement them: from the 1800s to the failures in the 1960s and 1980s through to today. The reason is the absence of a good system for helping teachers
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Bowles at Bruegel said 54% of EU jobs are at risk of advances in computerization, ranging from 40% to over 60% in each country and close to the US number in the UK, Germany and France. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University estimated in September
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ray Stone at Stone & McCarthy Research said the extent of labor-market slack may be less than Yellen purports. Stone’s favorite pay measure is table B-9 at the very end of the jobs report: an index that takes into account average hourly earnings, the length of the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The last two Fed tightening cycles saw gains in debt securities from Treasuries to junk bonds: between June 2004 and June 2006 when the Fed raised rates to 5.25 percent from 1 percent, and in the 7 months ended January 2000 when rates rose 1.75 percent. Paul Zemsky at Voya Investment
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Chris Rupkey at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ said we cannot keep getting payroll numbers like these and not admit that the labor market has healed. Rupkey said states with higher unemployment are seeing steep declines, and big-number declines equal big progress on putting America back to work.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Gary Shilling writes: Persistently slow growth will NOT be the norm for years to come. When private-sector deleveraging is completed, real GDP growth will return to its long-run trend of 3.5 percent or more. Productivity will return to 2.5 percent annual growth or more after deleveraging is
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