Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Colleges give prospective students very little information about how much money they can expect to earn in the job market. In part that’s because colleges may not want people to know, and in part it’s because such information is difficult and expensive to gather. Colleges are good at tracking down rich alumni to hit up…
The unemployment rate is low by any historical standard at 5.1 percent. Businesses are complaining of worker shortages in industries like health care, construction and trucking. Household-name companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have announced increases to their pay for low-wage workers. Add those together, and it would seem to point to 2015 as the year…
China’s stock markets continued a seemingly uncontrolled drop on Monday, pulling everything from Asia stock exchanges to commodities down further with them. Despite a huge amount of government stimulus, investors have lost faith in China’s stocks and are now focused on an impossible to answer question: how bad will China’s economic slowdown be? The Shanghai…
Back in July we wrote “Slamming The Door Shut On The “Plunging Labor Force Participation Rate” Debate Once And For All“, in which we showed, definitively we thought, that contrary to the pervasive and erroneous propaganda, the collapse in the labor force has little to do with the alleged millions of retiring baby boomers (quite…
Back in May, I penned a missive entitled “If You Don’t Like It, Change It” which discussed the pending changes to the GDP calculation by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). To wit: “Now, for all of you playing the home version of “Nail That GDP Number,” it was just a couple of years ago…
Federal Reserve policy makers said the labor market and housing have improved, moving closer to ending an unprecedented period of near-zero interest rates without providing a clear signal on the timing of liftoff. “The labor market continued to improve, with solid job gains and declining unemployment,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement…
Entry Text Millennials may be spending more for college and racking up record debt, but they don’t mind, according to a new survey of 500 university graduates by Credit Sesame. In summary, despite the skyrocketing cost of higher education, Millennials (individuals born between 1981 and 2004) have a more positive opinion of college than Gen…
In this Oct. 6, 2011 photo, Gan Golan of Los Angeles, dressed as the “Master of Degrees,” holds a ball and chain representing his college loan debt during Occupy DC activities in (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Getting an advanced degree doesn’t come cheap, which is why graduate students carry nearly half of all student debt. But it turns out that a…
In China, the invisible hand of the market sometimes needs help from the iron fist of the state. That’s certainly true after a meltdown vaporized $3.5 trillion in the value of shares traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges. President Xi Jinping’s government isn’t being subtle in its campaign to reflate the bubble it had a big…
The turmoil in China’s stock market is so bad that some companies are calling it quits. Over 700 Chinese companies have halted trading to “self preserve,” according to the state media. That means about a quarter of the companies listed on China’s two big exchanges — the Shanghai and Shenzhen — are no longer trading….