wages

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph had an interesting post out yesterday on demographic trends in China. He writes that the working-age population in China is now shrinking as China ages quickly, in part due to the one-child policy.…

By Marc Chandler The US jobs report was decidedly mixed. There was good and bad news but the bottom line is that the data is still too weak for the Fed to even consider ending its unconventional policy. The economy created a net 114k jobs…

By Michael Pettis Three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published my OpEd piece about concern that China may try to make the rebalancing process less painful by allowing the RMB to depreciate. In the piece I argue that this isn’t as…

No huge commentary today. But what struck me about the links in today's edition was how many were related to the loss of jobs and income both in the US and Europe. Rick Bookstaber's post about the Great Labor Reset has me thinking about how…

I want to revisit Richard Koo's comments three weeks ago after his meeting with a number of German policymakers. I think they are illuminating in terms of why Euro crisis policy is as it is. And given the downturn in German economic…

Just to put some meat on the bones around the cyclical downturn turning into recession, the personal income data paint a negative picture absent debt accumulation. What we see in recessions is that personal income leads the cycle and when…

In recent months, we have seen a precipitous drop in Chinese trade growth. This comes from both the export and the import side. What's happening? A large part of it is wages. As I indicated two years ago in a post on the Lewis Turning…

The ECRI released the following chart on the year-over-year growth in US real personal income. The takeaway here is that personal income growth is seriously flagging going into the fiscal cliff which promises to turn income growth decidedly…

I have noted a number of times in the past that household debt levels in Canada have reached worrying levels. I am not the only one on to this. Canadian central bank head Mark Carney was in the news yesterday sounding the alarm on this as…

Gary Shilling recently wrote a five-part series for Bloomberg News on the economy. His view is that GDP growth comes primarily from consumers spending from either higher income or from reduced savings and debt accumulation. In his view, the…