Author Archives: Daniela75Q

Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

by Daniela75Q Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Binyamin Applebaum asks inflation hawk Jeffrey Lacker why inflation hasn’t risen if labor markets are tight, as he believes:

….There’s this confusion about real and nominal that I think infects the discussion, particularly of wages and slack. Real wages have accelerated over the last year because inflation has fallen and the rate of gain in nominal wages hasn’t changed much. The wage pressures we’ve been hearing about, they show up in the macro data as real wage pressures.

And the historical evidence suggests that there’s some lag before things accelerate as you reduce slack significantly. In 1966-67, we had unemployment at 5 percent, we pushed it to 4, and it was 1967 and 1968 when inflation took off. So there was a significant lag in the way that relationship seems to have worked in the past.

That got me curious: have real wages risen over the past couple of years? My preferred measure is production and nonsupervisory wages, and it looks like Lacker is right. Compared to CPI, the general trend is upward. It doesn’t look to me like it’s accelerating, but it does seem to be going up.

Continued – 

Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

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Hair Update: Short Wins By a Landslide

by Daniela75Q Posted on August 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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So what does the commentariat think on the hair front? Here’s a smattering of comments from folks who like my new, shorter hair:

DM: Makes you look quietly studly and stoic.

JS: The short look, with the T-shirt, is hot. You’ll just have to get used to the idea that you’re going to turn female heads when you walk into a restaurant.

EVC: Even without the tattoos, you look so much more hip and bad-ass. It’s a good look.

CLD: It’s like Johnny Depp in Black Mass, it’s the new look.

SG: Clean, cool, contemporary. And it makes you look ten years younger.

RS: As a personal finance professor, I like that you can have your wife cut it with at home electric hair clipper package; it’s easy at that length!

LD: It’s more interesting, less like an insurance salesman from the ’50’s.

And here’s a smattering of comment from the one person who likes my old, longer hair:

JD: Your old hair is so cute. And you might as well enjoy it while you can, because, face it, the day will come when it will all go away anyway. Dad did not have much hair at your age.

Well….but Dad didn’t have much hair by the time he was 30, either. I plan to take after my maternal grandfather, who kept his hair into his 90s. In any case, the new hair wins by about 487 to 1. But let’s face it: the vote was rigged from the start. Nobody was going to vote for that old hair. Besides, if I were sporting a polka-dot mohawk you guys would all vote for it. Don’t lie. You know you would.

So that’s that. Short hair wins. However, it turns out that none of your votes counted anyway. Marian voted for the new hair, and she outvoted all of you. Funny how that works.

Read more:

Hair Update: Short Wins By a Landslide

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