It was a busy week with a visit by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve President, Neel Kashkari. I will post about that later probably. With the other economic news coming out about the shelving of another vote on healthcare overhaul and the release of a tax plan, wages and income seem to be as relevant now as they were in the last few weeks.
Continue reading Recent Income Trends for Four Counties in North Dakota
I gave a presentation today that included the following graphs. I looked at unemployment on a county-by-county basis in Minnesota and North Dakota. The concentrations of unemployment are pretty interesting.
Housing remains a frequent topic of discussion for people in North Dakota. Most of the discussion falls under the heading of “affordability”, a suitably vague term essentially guaranteeing little to no progress on the issue, if it is a problem at all. What is the affordability issue? My suspicion is that people are thinking of something similar to the following graph:
I was startled by some of the information in this article. The most startling thing I learned today might be that Japan is only 39 percent self-sufficient as far as calories. I knew Japan relied on significant imports of fuels given their natural resource limitations. But food? This is a developed country, one that was supposed to rival the economic might of the United States in the 1980s. Relying on imports for such a significant part of food consumption can be a serious issue. Combine this with economic stagnation and an aging population and it hardly seems like a recipe for an economic turnaround.
Continue reading Another lesson in the limits of economic management