Should they cut or should they hold? If they cut there will be trouble. If they pause it will be double. Tell me quick, I want to know. Should they cut or should they hold!? Pretty much everything has been said about whether the Fed should take out an insurance cut in the fed funds… Read more

[My CBPP/Full-employment-project colleague Kathleen Bryant has a new paper coming out next week with Dartmouth econ professor Danny Blanchflower (et al) on measures of labor market slack and their correlation with wage growth. A key focus of the paper involves the underemployment rate, and since we learned today that u6 hit a cyclical low last… Read more

Payrolls were up 75,000 last month, less than half of what was expected, though the unemployment rate held steady at its 50-year low of 3.6 percent. Despite the low jobless rate, wage growth failed to accelerate, and has been stuck around 3 percent for a few months now. Downward revision shaved 75,000 jobs off of… Read more

As you know if you’ve looked at any morning paper, the Trump administration has proposed an escalating tariff on all imports from Mexico, starting at 5 percent on June 10th and rising by five percentage points each month until it reaches 25 percent. The tariffs are intended to force Mexico to take actions to reduce… Read more

The Trump administration’s proposal to change the way the poverty line is annually adjusted for inflation is the policy equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sounds technical and weedy, but a new paper by CBPP’s Aviva Aron-Dine and Matt Broaddus shows just how damaging the change will be for the health coverage and benefits… Read more