wages

Central banks have done a great job at driving up the price of gold but a horrible job at creating wage inflation. If it now takes 88 hours to buy an ounce of gold versus 20 hours in 2000, hasn’t that grossly deflated real wages in a…

Here is an interesting take on the valuation of the S&P500 by our friends over at The Chart Store, who do excellent work. Their chart shows that it now takes 69.23 hours at the average hourly wage of $19.53 to buy the S&P500.

By Rick Bookstaber In a recent post I discuss six policies that spurred the Industrial Revolution in England – opening up immigration, weakening the guilds, investing in infrastructure, privatizing agricultural land, forcing a move to new…

Here’s an interesting video clip that reinforces our view that almost all new innovation and technology is labor saving/destroying and that U.S. unemployment is much more structural than most perceive (click here to view video). Even the…

Great data from from the BLS. The average annual wage in New York’s financial industry more than tripled from 1990 to 2009.

Another awesome piece of work from our friends over at The Chart Store. The chart below is a times series of the numbers of hours of work — based on the average hourly wage — needed to buy a barrel of crude oil. Given the current wage of…

Jobs and the lack of them are top of the agenda for policymakers and increasingly groups of protestors gathered in the financial districts of New York, London, and elsewhere. Unemployment in these countries is in danger of reaching 10%. In…

Since everyone is talking about increased wealth and income disparities in the US, it is useful to have some numbers to point to. You saw yesterday’s chart of the day on income as measured by 2008 tax returns. Today’s chart of the day comes…

Here’s a nice little graphic from the site Visualizing Economics on the US income distribution as measured by income from 2008 tax returns.

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett explains his paper with Nouriel Roubini and Daniel Alpert on “Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Growth”. His prescription is one part credit writedowns, one part debt rebalancing,…