Friday, April 29, 2011

You Take the Good. You Take the Bad.

A few data points from today...

The Good

This morning's Chicago PMI showed that delivery times have slowed. How is this possibly a good thing? Well, if corporations are slowing delivers due to a lack of capacity, they are more likely to invest in more capacity, add (or at least stop laying off) employees, or in a perfect world... both.



The Bad: Sustainability of Consumption

Also released this morning was personal income and consumption for March. The chart below shows personal income, personal consumption, and personal consumption less transfer payments (defined as money given by the government to its citizens). Excluding these payments, which includes unemployment benefits, the savings rate is... wait for it... negative (good over the short run perhaps, but without hiring this hardly seems sustainable).



Source: ISM / BEA

3 comments:

  1. Jake..
    do you have some data about US small/medium industries & companies ?!

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  2. gdr- not sure what some data means, but i have not been explicitly looking into small / medium industries and companies

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good one, Jake.

    You're getting very close to thinking like in MMT terms, if you are not already.

    ReplyDelete