FEATURED POST
January 13, 2025
The skills opportunity
Job reports move markets because they’re the strongest signal economists have about the strength of the U.S. economy. But worker productivity is just as important to economic growth; it’s just harder to measure or capture.
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July 18, 2022
MainStreet Macro: Wages Go Prime Time: Part 2
My kids are into memes and have been since, well, the beginning of meme history. Given that my husband and I both are economists, it was only natural that a recent family dinner conversation centered around which meme would best represent inflation.
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July 11, 2022
MainStreet Macro: Wages go prime time: Part 1
Wages are the bridge between job growth and rising inflation, and their trajectory will determine whether the Federal Reserve can put the brakes on rising prices without skidding the economy into recession. To that end, the central bank is eying one particular data point with new intensity.
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June 27, 2022
MainStreet Macro: A Penny Saved
Savings accounts were the unsung heroes of the pandemic recovery.
The personal saving rate – the share of a person’s disposable income left after taxes and spending on necessities and everything else – soared to a record of almost 34 percent in April 2020. That means people saved 34 cents for every dollar earned in the early days of the pandemic.
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June 21, 2022
MainStreet Macro: The New World of Inflation
by Nela Richardson, Ph.D.
The Federal Reserve met last week and raised short term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point. That’s the biggest rate hike since 1994. At that time year-over-year CPI inflation was just shy of 3 percent gas prices were around a $1 a gallon and house price growth was up 2.5 percent from the previous year.
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June 13, 2022
MainStreet Macro: Missing Workers: Hiring in a Tight Job Market
Summer usually signals the start of theme park season, when adventure-seekers line up for the adrenaline rush of their favorite roller coaster and its ups and downs.
Labor market watchers can relate to those ups and downs – maybe too much, lately. It’s clear that employers, workers and jobseekers are more than ready for some stability.
The labor market’s high-speed airtime cost more than 19 million workers their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, we’ve recovered, but that ride has been bumpy and uneven.
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June 6, 2022
MainStreet Macro: What are small businesses telling us about inflation?
I spend a lot of time talking about small employers because they punch above their weight when it comes to the economy. Companies with fewer than 500 employees created two-thirds of net new jobs leading into the pandemic, and they led the recovery afterward. Each quarter, we at the ADP Research Institute survey our small company clients to gather their insight on the business landscape. This quarter, they wanted to talk about the macroeconomy and – no surprise -- inflation. Here are three things clients are telling us.
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May 31, 2022
MainStreet Macro: Globalization: The Promise, Perils, and Possibilities
Last week I joined the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland. After a two-year hiatus from in-person events, world leaders, CEOs, international investors, and nonprofits reconvened at a time of great risk to global growth. This week, on the occasion of the Davos meetings, I’ll review the promise, the perils and the possibilities of globalization from the perspective of Main Street.
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May 23, 2022
MainStreet Macro: How data is transforming Main Street
Last week I spoke at the World Data Summit in Amsterdam, a conference at which experts from across the globe met to discuss the most pressing data issues of our time. As the name suggests, data is fast becoming the universal language of business. For that reason, in this week’s blog I thought we’d talk about why data is important to Main Street.
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