Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The end of the emergency federal $300 weekly unemployment benefit is unlikely to drive large numbers of workers back into the labor market, several studies by economists and the Financial Times have found. About 7.5 million potential workers were impacted when the COVID-era weekly subsidy ended on the 6 September federal cutoff date, the FT...

Of the 5.5 million U.S. workers still jobless from the COVID War, more than half are not seeking work and no longer plan to, according to a report published last week by JP Morgan. “About half of the people who lost jobs during COVID are still actively looking for work, while the other half are...

New claims for state jobless benefits bumped up to 351,000 in the most recent week, compared to 335,000 the week before and disappointing analysts’ expectations for just 320,000 new filings, labor department figures show. Continuing claims rose to 2.85 million, passing economists’ expectation of 2.6 million. The figures show the largest increases since July and...

If Congress does not raise the debt limit and the U.S. defaults on its debts, the country would vaporize six million jobs, bounce the unemployment rate to 9 percent, and the economy could hurtle into a tailspin that would rival the Great Depression, Moody’s Analytics declared in a 21 September report, “Playing a Dangerous Game...

The U.S. Federal Reserve could begin paring back its $120-billion monthly purchase of government and mortgage bonds within six weeks and be ready to raise interest rates next year, the Fed announced after its policy meeting last week. The Fed has been buying $80 billion in government bonds and $40 billion in mortgage bonds every...

In The Bronx, there is a saying: “Bullshit has its own sound.” While we have long been forecasting that inflation pressures would continue to rise, we kept noting that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Bankster Gang had been spewing out bullshit for most of the year claiming that inflation was...

In the depths of 2020’s crisis, roughly 19 percent of Manhattan’s office space—about 47.4 million square feet—stood empty. More millions of retail space went vacant as restaurants were shut down and shops that depended on commuters and tourists went dark. Things are not significantly better now. The Delta virus has kept away the customers that...

After opening about 250 warehouses in the U.S. this year, Amazon will open another 100 this month, bringing distribution even closer to every American home, and adding another 125,000 blue-collar workers, the company announced. The company will entice new workers in a tight labor market by raising the average wage in its merchandise caverns to...

Some say that one meaning of Shakespeare’s phrase “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion” is that those in a position of power and influence should take special care to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But perhaps some Federal Reserve officials, including even Chairman Jerome Powell, never studied Shakespeare. CNBC reports, on 17 September, that...

The recent ethics outcry over stock trades by Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which we detailed in “Bankster Bandits Get Rich Playing the Inside Track” (14 Sep 2021), were foretold by information in his financial disclosure forms covering 2020, Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) reported. Kaplan reported in the document...