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Posts Tagged ‘Data’

Google recently released some major improvements in its public data efforts. If you click on over to Public Data, you will find a much broader range of data sets including economic information from the OECD and World Bank, key economic statistics for the United States, and some education statistics for California. Google has also included [...]

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The most encouraging item in todays jobs report was the sharp drop in underemployment (which includes not only those who are unemployed but also marginally attached workers and those who are part time for economic reasons). The underemployment rate fell to 16.5%, down from its peak of 17.4% last October and from 17.3% in December:

The [...]

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(This is a slightly edited version of a piece that appeared yesterday over at e21.)
As policymakers ponder whether and how they might be able to do more to encourage job creation, they should keep in mind that the monthly payroll job figures [e.g., -85,000 in December] are the net result of literally millions of hiring [...]

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Today’s jobs report invites both negative and positive interpretations.
The positives are fewer, so let’s start with them:

With job losses of 85,000, December was the second-best (or, if you prefer, second-least-bad) month since January 2008.
With today’s revisions, November actually showed job gains of 4,000, the first increase since December 2007.
Put that all together, and job losses [...]

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As expected, the Bureau of Economic Analysis revised down its estimate of Q3 GDP growth. BEA’s second estimate pegs growth at a 2.8% annual pace in Q3, down from 3.5% in the advance estimate.
The revision was driven by three main factors: consumer spending and business investment in structures were weaker than previously estimated, while imports [...]

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As expected, the economy grew at a healthy pace in the third quarter, expanding at a 3.5% annual pace according to this morning’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Among the highlights:

Consumer spending grew at a 3.4% pace, the fastest since the first quarter of 2007. A substantial fraction of that growth reflects vehicle purchases, [...]

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Earlier today, the Federal Reserve released its latest data on industrial production. Bottom line: production over the past three months has been surprisingly strong. Growth in September was more than expected, and the previous month was revised upward.
Industrial production has now increased for three straight months, as has a slightly narrower measure, manufacturing production:

As you [...]

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Kudos to Floyd Norris over at the New York Times for characterizing total job losses to date as 8 million jobs, not “just” 7.2 million. As I discussed on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of jobs in March 2009 was 824,000 lower than it previously thought. But BLS won’t include [...]

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Today’s jobs report was weak across the board: September payrolls fell by 263,000, the unemployment rate rose to 9.8%, the underemployment rate (U-6) rose to 17.0%, and average weekly hours fell to 33.0, tying the record low set in June.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that payrolls declined by 13,000 more in July and [...]

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Earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released updated GDP figures, estimating that the economy contracted at a 0.7% pace in the second quarter. The BEA’s well-named “third estimate” thus indicated that the decline in the second quarter was somewhat slower than the 1.0% BEA had previously estimated.
As I mentioned a couple of months ago, [...]

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