FEATURED POST
April 22, 2025
In full swing: What baseball and housing have in common
Baseball and the housing market have a couple of things in common. Both reach peak activity in the spring and both are tracked using a plethora of statistics. The granular details of RBIs, home runs, and at-bats are known to every diehard baseball fan. Housing’s copious data—sales both new and existing, starts, permits, and mortgage rates—make it the statistical envy of other sectors.
And just as a baseball team’s stats can foreshadow its win/loss record, housing stats tend to be a leading indicator of a market’s overall economic performance.
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April 15, 2025
Small business startups: The beat goes on. Or does it?
While market volatility dominated the headlines last week, small businesses quietly hit a milestone. Applications for new startups reached their second-highest level on record. Small businesses have long served as the backbone of U.S. employment. During the economic expansion that preceded the 2020 pandemic—at more than 10 years, it was the longest period of growth in U.S. history—small business created almost two-thirds of all new jobs.
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April 10, 2025
Wait. And watch.
It took no time at all for financial markets to react to the Trump administration’s tariff plan. Global stock prices grappled with the news even before the initial round of tariffs took hold early on April 5. The rebound was equally swift when tariffs were paused on April 9.
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March 25, 2025
Anchors aweigh
Stock markets are choppy, and a fog has descended on the economic outlook. That has business leaders and market watchers on the hunt for signs in the economic data to guide them. However, one of the most important drivers of the economy can’t easily be seen even when skies are clear: anchors. These are rules of thumb that, for better or worse, guide how people make decisions.
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March 18, 2025
What’s slowing the inflation slowdown?
Good news! Inflation is slowing. The annualized pace of consumer inflation fell to 2.8 percent in February from 3 percent in January. For businesses, price growth was 3.2 percent, down from 3.7 percent. We’re getting closer to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate of inflation. But there’s another 2 percent touchstone that matters even more for inflation in the long term—productivity growth.
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March 11, 2025
The other T word: Part II
In my last Main Street Macro exploring the state of labor market turnover, I argued that a healthy job market requires a healthy level of churn. Employers need to have the ability to attract talented and skilled people with strong pay and better career prospects, and they need to be able to replace departing employees. But how much turnover is too much? How much is enough?
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February 25, 2025
The other T word
Economic news has been dominated by two T words this year: Technology and tariffs. But there’s another T word that promises to have a far greater impact on the job market and inflation: Turnover.
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February 18, 2025
Worker-consumer synchronicity
Last week’s consumer sentiment data flashed a yellow light of caution that the consumer resilience that has powered the U.S. economic engine over the last four years is sputtering. Consumer retail sales in January fell by 0.9 percent from December, a much stronger pullback than economists had expected. The spending decline was broad-based, meaning that even colder-than-average temperatures across much of the country couldn’t completely explain the magnitude of the slowdown.
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