The Viral Economy

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malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Not having a clean dividing line between work/home I buy. Getting up and going out to my car because we miss traffic? Right...I wouldn't be surprised to find out Fortune had an AI write that.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by LawBeefaroni »

I hate my commute and it's only 20 minutes. It's a daily reminder of how inconsiderate and absent minded the average person is.

And worse, we've had an increase in in-person meetings so I've hadp to do hour-plus drives to outlying locations more and .more lately. Next week I have to do a conference downtown. I haven't been downtown for a year or more and the prospect of dealing with the traffic, parking, parking reimbursement...just seems dumb.
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LordMortis
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by LordMortis »

I keep forgetting how bad commuting is until I make it a point to be somewhere that requires me to drive during rush "hour" traffic. Then I suffer from PTSD and vow I won't make it a point to be somewhere that requires me to drive during those weekday windows again. I don't mind an hour drive. I hate an hour drive where stop and go is in places that shouldn't be stop and go or where people try to use a merging lane as a passing lane or you can expect people to blow through red light or I have to wait three plus light cycles to get past a single light, etc... etc... etc... etc...
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by ImLawBoy »

There's something to the lack of a dividing line between work and home, at least for me. When I'm working at home, there's a weird gap between getting up from the computer and re-engaging with the family. I don't artificially recreate that by sitting in the car, but it's there.

When I go into the office now I drive. Traffic is horrible, but I tend not to stress it too much because I don't need to punch in by a certain time or anything. I won't say I enjoy the commute, but I've gotten into a relative groove with it and like to listen to various satellite radio stations.

I'd like to at some point resume commuting by train, but I'm not currently digging the enclosed space with hardly anyone masking. I used to get a lot of reading done on the train.
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malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

A good piece on the economic uncertainty we are seeing. If you don't have access, here is the tldr; -- economic models don't know how to "price in" all the uncertainty. I have been calling it 'muddiness' with good reports buttressing all the doom and gloom.

The bottom line is that calls for recession are pure guesses (and not supported by evidence) and Biden parading around and calling it a boom could well be wrong too. Our predictive models just weren't built for all the unique and overlapping conditions happening out there.

Washington Post
As President Biden prepares to deliver the State of the Union address Tuesday night, he finds himself presiding over an economic puzzle.

The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by 4½ percentage points over the past 11 months, one of its sharpest moves in several decades, in a bid to cool off the economy and ease rising prices.

Yet employers continue to hire as if the good times will never end. In January, they added 517,000 jobs — almost twice as many as in December — while the unemployment rate fell to its lowest mark since 1969.

...

The Fed should rethink conventional economic theory that says inflation must inevitably rise as the unemployment rate falls because employers competing for a dwindling pool of workers will bid up wages and, eventually, prices will follow, he said.

That theory doesn’t explain the past year when the annual rate of increase in average hourly earnings dropped from 5.9 percent in March to 4.4 percent last month — even as the job market grew increasingly tight, Baumohl said.

Further clouding the economic outlook: The pandemic’s wake coincides with a host of uncommon forces. Fallout from the war in Europe, unpredictable populist governments and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy all complicate the Fed’s task, said Singh, a former Biden aide.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Carpet_pissr »

My God, man, are you suggesting that we *can’t* predict the future?! :P
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Carpet_pissr wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:14 pm My God, man, are you suggesting that we *can’t* predict the future?! :P
:) Still everyone is sure there will be a recession this year. I mean there are people batting around the idea that we have been and are *in a recession* right now which made little sense with the data we had even a couple of months ago and keeps getting contraindicated by aggregate evidence.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Isgrimnur »

Economics is as much mass psychology as "science".
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Isgrimnur wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 1:35 pm Economics is as much mass psychology as "science".
It's almost like it models human behaviors. :) Sometimes the discipline does a great job and other times...not so much and we hopefully learn from that.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 1:32 pm
Carpet_pissr wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:14 pm My God, man, are you suggesting that we *can’t* predict the future?! :P
:) Still everyone is sure there will be a recession this year. I mean there are people batting around the idea that we have been and are *in a recession* right now which made little sense with the data we had even a couple of months ago and keeps getting contraindicated by aggregate evidence.
Goldman put it at 40-55% chance this year, IIRC. Yes, it's essentially saying it's a coin flip but more telling is the fact that that's the biggest range in many decades. Not only is there uncertainty, but there is uncertainty about the uncertainty.
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malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

LawBeefaroni wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 4:51 pm
malchior wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 1:32 pm
Carpet_pissr wrote: Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:14 pm My God, man, are you suggesting that we *can’t* predict the future?! :P
:) Still everyone is sure there will be a recession this year. I mean there are people batting around the idea that we have been and are *in a recession* right now which made little sense with the data we had even a couple of months ago and keeps getting contraindicated by aggregate evidence.
Goldman put it at 40-55% chance this year, IIRC. Yes, it's essentially saying it's a coin flip but more telling is the fact that that's the biggest range in many decades. Not only is there uncertainty, but there is uncertainty about the uncertainty.
Right. People expect them to forecast but they don't want to outright say it's not forecastable. It feels like the "committee" decided to publicly just go with an option with tons of wiggle room.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Smoove_B »

I'm beginning to think our species is at a crossroads:
Small and midsize rural communities saw home prices surge during the first two years of the pandemic as workers with the newfound ability to do their jobs from anywhere relocated outside of city centers for more space and easy access to outdoor activities.

But that city-to-country migration has shown signs of reversing over the past year. Home buyers have been shopping for places closer to large metro areas, with cities like Washington and Los Angeles seeing population gains again in 2022. The shift comes as a growing number of employers are requiring workers to come back into the office — for the first time since the start of the pandemic, more than half of workers in major metro areas went into the office at least once from Jan. 18 to 25, according to data from the building security firm Kastle Systems.

“They need to be back for their work, they have to go back to their office, so we see that the big city centers are reviving as more people are going back,” said Nadia Evangelou, senior economist at the National Association of Realtors.

People’s desire to get out into nature also appears to have waned, with visits to popular national parks like Yellowstone and Zion down from their pandemic highs last year, RV demand slowing, and several popular ski resorts, like Vail in Colorado, having fewer visitors.
The pressure to return to 2019 is insane. Insane.

Bigger picture for the economy:
Real estate economists say that the rural areas that saw the biggest pandemic booms will likely see outsize declines in prices, compared to the housing market nationally.

But given the limited supply of housing and the unwillingness of homeowners with low mortgage interest rates to sell, prices aren’t expected to return to their pre-pandemic levels, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist for the real estate data firm Bright MLS.

“There’s just such an imbalance between how much housing is needed and how much housing is available, and that’s not going to change in the near term at all,” Sturtevant said. “That’s going to still be challenging.”
Maybe next year, maybe no go
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by LawBeefaroni »

Our neighbors just listed their place at a 30% premium over what they paid in 2019. I think it's more of a "what the hell, let's see if we get this crazy number" than a serious sell. But people "buy" based on the monthly payment and an average mortgage would be over $3400. No way. Plus about $900/month in property taxes.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

LawBeefaroni wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 12:31 pm Our neighbors just listed their place at a 30% premium over what they paid in 2019. I think it's more of a "what the hell, let's see if we get this crazy number" than a serious sell. But people "buy" based on the monthly payment and an average mortgage would be over $3400. No way. Plus about $900/month in property taxes.
That combined is approximately a rent payment in parts of NYC now.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 12:36 pm
LawBeefaroni wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 12:31 pm Our neighbors just listed their place at a 30% premium over what they paid in 2019. I think it's more of a "what the hell, let's see if we get this crazy number" than a serious sell. But people "buy" based on the monthly payment and an average mortgage would be over $3400. No way. Plus about $900/month in property taxes.
That combined is approximately a rent payment in parts of NYC now.
Rent in the same building here is about $3K. We'd consider buying it and renting/AirBnBing but not when costs exceed rent by that much.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Jaymon »

Those numbers. I just don't trust them. Some big companies are recording record profits, so they don't think we are in a recession, so its skewing the numbers. But here is what I think. The cost of groceries is up. The cost of restaurants is up. The cost of rent is up. But paychecks, they are not up. Post covid, everything costs more, but there is the same or less amount of money to pay for it with. And I just don't know if those leading economic indicators are showing that.
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malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

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Jaymon wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 1:46 pm Those numbers. I just don't trust them. Some big companies are recording record profits, so they don't think we are in a recession, so its skewing the numbers. But here is what I think. The cost of groceries is up. The cost of restaurants is up. The cost of rent is up. But paychecks, they are not up.
This is the problem with individual perceptions. They're often wrong. Real wages right now are trending well above what they were before the pandemic in the United States. Actually there was a period during the early shutdown in the pandemic where they spiked to very high levels. Since then it was a notable component of inflation itself which is part of the math behind the interest rate hikes. I'll caveat that we only have data through October. Payroll data takes a while to be collected/computed.
Post covid, everything costs more, but there is the same or less amount of money to pay for it with. And I just don't know if those leading economic indicators are showing that.
They aren't showing that because it isn't true. Your individual perception? It's your perception but aggregate data tells a very different story.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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Well, at least some people are noticing things:
At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, President Donald Trump and the US Congress enacted a flurry of measures intended to soften the blow of the coming economic crisis. Just like the child care measures funded by the Lanham Act of 1940, the federal government launched us into a great experiment, pushing us closer than ever to achieving the most unlikely of outcomes: free college and universal health care. Over the past three years, tens of millions of Americans have not had to pay anything toward their student debt, and even more Americans have gotten health care through Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) without having to worry about maintaining eligibility.

Unfortunately, with President Joe Biden’s announcement at the end of January to formally end the public health emergency in May, these positive outcomes of a terrible pandemic will cease. For years, pundits—right-wing and liberal alike—have warned that making health care and education free would cost too much, crash the economy, and lead to laziness. Yet when we look at the actual outcomes of these three experimental years—under the most adverse circumstances—we see something different. Right now, we have reached the lowest percentage of Americans without health insurancein US history. At the same time, more than 30 million Americans have seen their credit scores rise as result of the loan repayment freeze, while having generally more money for essentials.

Recently, the Biden administration has been rightly pointing out that the economy is surging, but we’re not seeing enough progressive politicians consistently draw connections between these policies and the strong economy. As we confront losing these programs, it’s worth recognizing what we just achieved.
Thinking about the future:
And so there’s a lesson here. When the uninsured rate starts to rise again, as it will, and if the economy tanks because borrowers no longer have as much spending power, we’ll need to remember that these outcomes are choices. We’ve glimpsed what happens when people don’t worry about losing health care or can go to college debt free: They live longer, get the care they need, escape debt burdens, and are able to make better choices in their lives. Such programs should be the starting point for what we try to do next. Instead, we’re letting a better safety net slip from our grasp.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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BLS: Real average hourly earnings down 1.7 percent from December 2021 to December 2022
The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 1.4 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 3.1-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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The economy is losing productivity due to COVID and worker burnout. Higher borrowing costs will reduce investment. Eventually that will be shown in the numbers.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

FWIW you typically need to look at median weekly earnings for full-time to see the accurate picture. That's the preferred measure the Fed tracks at least. Part-time per hour wages don't tell you how many hours they worked and the averages are often skewed. If more people are working full-time (and it appears they are) then the weekly earnings is more accurate.

Notably no one has a great way to track gig economy work so it's incomplete but it's generally the best source of data we have.

Edit: The image hosting doesn't seem to be working. I'll link it for now.
Zarathud wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 3:00 pm The economy is losing productivity due to COVID and worker burnout. Higher borrowing costs will reduce investment. Eventually that will be shown in the numbers.
This appears to be true but it's been happening for a long-time (and was a trend pre-pandemic). There is a huge argument right now if that is broad based or not. For instance, construction has a persistently lower productivity rate than the late 60s. Ezra Klein just had a good piece on the issues there. In the end it isn't necessarily just COVID or burnout. It's regulation (which has pros and cons). It's lack of competition. It's the rent seeking. Lots of issues.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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Real wages may be up on average but as the rich get richer that just means at best, half of the population is seeing real wage increases.
At the same time, more than 30 million Americans have seen their credit scores rise as result of the loan repayment freeze, while having generally more money for essentials.
"Credit scores rise?" That is hilarious. A credit score is just a measure of how good of a debt mule you are.

Image
Lenders lick their chops as credit scores rise. In case you're wondering, that chart keeps going up into 2023 and all predictions are that it goes parabolic. And that's just credit card debt. Mortgage debt is growing even more, although we call that "good debt".
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Kraken »

I wonder if the economic indicators are munged because the Democrats spent the past two years rebuilding the economy from the ground up, reversing 40 years of top-down economic policy. Maybe that screws up the traditional metrics.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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Kraken wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 3:52 pm I wonder if the economic indicators are munged because the Democrats spent the past two years rebuilding the economy from the ground up, reversing 40 years of top-down economic policy. Maybe that screws up the traditional metrics.
I don't know that they've rebuilt the economy from the ground up. It's mostly the same machine underneath. The administration has definitely helped unsnarl issues but the meat of it remains the same - with all the same inequality issues - and Biden kicked the student loan debt can a little down the road. I definitely wouldn't say people's finances are definitely better but wages somewhat improved and that means in the future we might see some of the negatives such as inequality decrease. Maybe.

I think the muddiness we're seeing is still very much a descendent of the idea that we've never had a globally integrated economy deal with a global pandemic where individual nations, states, corporations, and people did all sorts of things that have never happened before. That's why I find the notion of forecasting to be a dubious enterprise and instead I focus on what we see now which often is incompatible with the story we are being sold.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:26 pm Biden kicked the student loan debt can a little down the road.
He made the other side file lawsuits and get injunctions? :think:
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Isgrimnur wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:36 pm
malchior wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:26 pm Biden kicked the student loan debt can a little down the road.
He made the other side file lawsuits and get injunctions? :think:
Yeah good point but that wasn't what I exactly meant. Even if the plan works out it only makes small improvements in a huge problem.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 4:26 pm
Kraken wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 3:52 pm I wonder if the economic indicators are munged because the Democrats spent the past two years rebuilding the economy from the ground up, reversing 40 years of top-down economic policy. Maybe that screws up the traditional metrics.
I don't know that they've rebuilt the economy from the ground up. It's mostly the same machine underneath. The administration has definitely helped unsnarl issues but the meat of it remains the same - with all the same inequality issues - and Biden kicked the student loan debt can a little down the road. I definitely wouldn't say people's finances are definitely better but wages somewhat improved and that means in the future we might see some of the negatives such as inequality decrease. Maybe.

I think the muddiness we're seeing is still very much a descendent of the idea that we've never had a globally integrated economy deal with a global pandemic where individual nations, states, corporations, and people did all sorts of things that have never happened before. That's why I find the notion of forecasting to be a dubious enterprise and instead I focus on what we see now which often is incompatible with the story we are being sold.
Income inequality has decreased over the past two years. I couldn't find the source that I saw reported a few weeks ago with nifty charts and graphs, but I did find this fellow summing it up:
national numbers show hourly earnings have risen fastest for occupations paying the least while at the same time increasing the slowest for occupations paying the most. This has resulted in income inequality decreasing during the last two years.

Don’t misinterpret this statement. Workers in high-earning occupations still make more money than workers in low-earning occupations. Yet, compared to two years ago, the gap in earnings is lower today. What’s happened to cause this outcome? Has our economic world been turned upside down? No, it’s not been turned upside down, but it may have been twisted.

Two forces have collided to reduce income inequality. The first is the pandemic. The pandemic made many people cautious about taking jobs that often require personal contact, particularly if the job is low-paying. Indeed, studies are now revealing a significant number of workers furloughed from their low-paying jobs during the pandemic used their free time to upgrade their skills. Consequently, when the economy reopened, those individuals moved to higher-paying occupations.

The second force is demographics. Many — but certainly not all — low-paying jobs are taken by young workers. The jobs I had while in high school and college were certainly low-paying. But due to a declining birth rate, the increase in younger workers has significantly slowed. This has limited the potential availability — in economics, we call it “supply” — of low-wage workers. Hence, with relatively fewer workers seeking their jobs, firms in low-paying businesses have needed to increase hourly earnings to compete for employees.


Wish I could find the report that he's summarizing, but I'm not Isgrimnur. Trust me that it exists.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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Now do wealth accumulation.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Yeah, credit scores are a farce. Wish I could find the detailed article I read a couple years ago about how absurdly manipulated they are.

Like HR, they are sold as being something that’s working for, or good for you, but in fact…
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Carpet_pissr »

“Notably no one has a great way to track gig economy work”

Huge blindspot. And probably causing havoc with traditional models. The biggest employers in the country use massive quantities of gig workers, including the federal government.

Just think of the number of Uber/Lyft drivers and Amazon deliverers, not to mention food delivery. That indeed may be where ‘all the workers have gone’. Or at least a lot.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Carpet_pissr wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 10:50 pm “Notably no one has a great way to track gig economy work”

Huge blindspot. And probably causing havoc with traditional models. The biggest employers in the country use massive quantities of gig workers, including the federal government.

Just think of the number of Uber/Lyft drivers and Amazon deliverers, not to mention food delivery. That indeed may be where ‘all the workers have gone’. Or at least a lot.
Sort of. I looked a little and they are typically 1099 workers at the big firms. The IRS is getting aggregate wage info for them. I don't know 100% for sure that data has been integrated into BLS/FED data collection efforts but I'd be really surprised if they aren't to some level. The blind spot is we don't have good visibility into what sort of benefits those people have, how do they get healthcare, how many hours are they *actually* working, etc.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:31 pm
Lawbeefaroni wrote:Because the jobs reports are merely cherry picked statistics. Biden had the press conference all queued up and ready to go on these fluff numbers.
I'm curious why you think it's cherry picked or fluff data? Jobs data is universally well-regarded and is seen as generally solid data. It's a key metric in most quant models for treasury yields, etc.

As reported by various reliable sources with deep research capabilities, most or all of the +517K job gains wasn’t due to new job creation, but to benchmark revisions, seasonal adjustments, and population controls, all keywords for what we can only describe as statistical magic. Morgan StanleyMS concluded that without the population adjustments, the Household Survey (which was up an even larger +894K), only rose +84K, while Rosenberg Research concluded the real Payroll number was only +44K.

Last Wednesday (February 1), ADP’s private payroll number was +106K. Over time, there is a 98% correlation between the ADP and Payroll employment reports. So, this divergence is quite unusual and it appears that one of these reports is misleading. ADP’s numbers have been below BLS’s for 7 months in a row (by -642K over that time period) and by more than -1.2 million over the past year. Given the state of the economy, with little to sluggish growth throughout 2022, it would appear that ADP’s numbers are more accurate. One advantage of the ADP report is that it sorts its data by firm size giving us better insights. For example, small business, which feels changes in the economy much more quickly than large businesses, shed -75,000 jobs in January. And, over the last four months, -260,000.
Yeah, yeah,it's Forbes but the WaPo version is paywalled. There are other sources as well. There are constantly changes to the methodology that magically favors the administration at the time.


I'm not saying it's actually 106K but I find it really hard to believe that it's 517K.
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Re: The Viral Economy

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malchior wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:31 pm
Lawbeefaroni wrote:Because the jobs reports are merely cherry picked statistics. Biden had the press conference all queued up and ready to go on these fluff numbers.
I'm curious why you think it's cherry picked or fluff data? Jobs data is universally well-regarded and is seen as generally solid data. It's a key metric in most quant models for treasury yields, etc.

As reported by various reliable sources with deep research capabilities, most or all of the +517K job gains wasn’t due to new job creation, but to benchmark revisions, seasonal adjustments, and population controls, all keywords for what we can only describe as statistical magic. Morgan StanleyMS concluded that without the population adjustments, the Household Survey (which was up an even larger +894K), only rose +84K, while Rosenberg Research concluded the real Payroll number was only +44K.

Last Wednesday (February 1), ADP’s private payroll number was +106K. Over time, there is a 98% correlation between the ADP and Payroll employment reports. So, this divergence is quite unusual and it appears that one of these reports is misleading. ADP’s numbers have been below BLS’s for 7 months in a row (by -642K over that time period) and by more than -1.2 million over the past year. Given the state of the economy, with little to sluggish growth throughout 2022, it would appear that ADP’s numbers are more accurate. One advantage of the ADP report is that it sorts its data by firm size giving us better insights. For example, small business, which feels changes in the economy much more quickly than large businesses, shed -75,000 jobs in January. And, over the last four months, -260,000.
Yeah, yeah,it's Forbes but the WaPo version is paywalled. There are other sources as well. There are constantly changes to the methodology that magically favors the administration at the time.


I'm not saying it's actually 106K but I find it really hard to believe that it's 517K.
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malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

LawBeefaroni wrote: Wed Feb 08, 2023 10:48 am
malchior wrote: Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:31 pm
Lawbeefaroni wrote:Because the jobs reports are merely cherry picked statistics. Biden had the press conference all queued up and ready to go on these fluff numbers.
I'm curious why you think it's cherry picked or fluff data? Jobs data is universally well-regarded and is seen as generally solid data. It's a key metric in most quant models for treasury yields, etc.

As reported by various reliable sources with deep research capabilities, most or all of the +517K job gains wasn’t due to new job creation, but to benchmark revisions, seasonal adjustments, and population controls, all keywords for what we can only describe as statistical magic. Morgan StanleyMS concluded that without the population adjustments, the Household Survey (which was up an even larger +894K), only rose +84K, while Rosenberg Research concluded the real Payroll number was only +44K.

Last Wednesday (February 1), ADP’s private payroll number was +106K. Over time, there is a 98% correlation between the ADP and Payroll employment reports. So, this divergence is quite unusual and it appears that one of these reports is misleading. ADP’s numbers have been below BLS’s for 7 months in a row (by -642K over that time period) and by more than -1.2 million over the past year. Given the state of the economy, with little to sluggish growth throughout 2022, it would appear that ADP’s numbers are more accurate. One advantage of the ADP report is that it sorts its data by firm size giving us better insights. For example, small business, which feels changes in the economy much more quickly than large businesses, shed -75,000 jobs in January. And, over the last four months, -260,000.
Yeah, yeah,it's Forbes but the WaPo version is paywalled.
What's interesting is the ADP thing. That's the source of the most confusion with people assuming ADP is more reliable. Except that they're is a lot of evidence they have been slipping in reliability for a long-time. With ADP giving shifting explanations about various reporting other mishaps. And those mishaps are totally normal to be honest. There are no perfect models.

Heck there was a lot of debate about ADP reliability in middle of the recovery after 2008. At one point ADP made a big show that they made changes to be more accurate. I think around 2012 or 2013...maybe. The point of bringing it up is that a year or two out several economists at the time pointed out that they had mostly reverted to the same error rate against the government despite all their innovations at the time.

Still the biggest hole in the argument is that the government gets 100% of 'on the books' payroll data. ADP has less than 20% of payroll market share. It's strange to argue that the capability to sort the data in a different way outperforms the governments reliance on far more data. I really don't understand the argument because it's sort of inane when you think about it.

As to the idea it is statistical manipulation - there are always revisions. It's baked into the process. Always has been. Previous months were all adjusted upwards. Meaning it wasn't just 517K jobs. In aggregate, over the preceding 3 months they revised up another +200K jobs. There is room to argue how accurate it is but this sort of hand waving that it isn't close makes me suspicious that it is agenda driven.
There are other sources as well. There are constantly changes to the methodology that magically favors the administration at the time.
There are constant changes to methodology because the economy and models often learn from past results. Claims that it benefits the administration are mostly just partisan blathering.

I'm not saying it's actually 106K but I find it really hard to believe that it's 517K.
I wouldn't die on the 517K rock either - it is of course subject to revision but the idea that it's significantly manipulated? That's ZeroHedge territory IMO.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Smoove_B »

I'm putting this here because it's related to COVID-19 funding:
Residents of 32 states who rely on federal assistance to buy food are about to see their benefits shrink at the end of the month.

An emergency increase to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called the Food Stamp Program) was approved at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. For most recipients, that increase amounted to an extra $95 monthly over the past three years.

Starting March 1, those emergency COVID-era benefits will end across all states.

Seventeen states already saw those benefits expire as of January 2023. One state, South Carolina, ended the emergency allotment at the start of February.

...

Those 32 states are Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

In 2021, more than 41 million Americans were using SNAP benefits to help afford food.
I'm sure this will totally help.
Maybe next year, maybe no go
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Smoove_B »

Hey, I know how we can address a worker shortage! Dial back American employment laws to the early 1900s - like they're trying in Iowa:
Iowans are in uproar after Senate File 167 was introduced in the Iowa Legislature, proposing a rewrite of Iowa’s child labor law. One might imagine this rewrite might be to further safeguard minors against hazardous working conditions or protect their educational opportunities, as those who came before us promised with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, that is not the case as the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Jason Schulz, pushes for teenagers as young as 14-years-old to work in previously prohibited jobs — like mining, meatpacking and logging — as long as they’re part of an approved training program. And these minors would be permitted to work longer shifts that last late into the evening. What’s more: if a teen gets sick, injured or killed on the job, the company they worked for would be free from any civil liability of negligence. That’s pretty abhorrent stuff.
Maybe next year, maybe no go
malchior
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by malchior »

Sure. Why not? Might as well embrace our destiny and build the shit hole dystopia of our dreams.
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Octavious
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Octavious »

Wow I actually joked to myself that I was waiting for them to try and bring back child labor. I didn't think anyone would be crazy enough to actually try. Hell it may work. :P
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by Alefroth »

Not just bringing back child labor, but making sure employers can't be held accountable.
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Re: The Viral Economy

Post by LawBeefaroni »

Jason Schulz, pushes for teenagers as young as 14-years-old to work in previously prohibited jobs — like mining...
Minor miners, now that sure is something.


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