NEW YORK – With recent data showing that both inflation and inflation expectations have eased, it would be irresponsible for the US Federal Reserve to create much higher unemployment. Amid so much uncertainty, it should instead pause interest-rate hikes until a more reliable assessment of macroeconomic conditions is possible. The US ...

NEW YORK – Today's inflation is driven largely by supply-side constraints, which call for supply-side solutions. Such measures would do as much to tame higher prices as limited increases in interest rates would, and they would not come at the expense of American workers and the broader economy. In the decades since the 1970s oil-price shocks ...

When the Labor Department released a disappointing employment report for April, it caught many economists by surprise. Most of us had predicted the economy had created around 900,000 jobs and forecast a drop in the unemployment rate of 0.2-0.3 percentage points. This seemed reasonable: Through March and April, most sectors of the economy ...

Given the precarious state of the economy, President Trump’s reckless decision to walk away from stimulus negotiations last week was a consequential act of political malpractice. He has since flipped and flopped on this by the hour, but his actions have been particularly rash, given his administration’s failure to even try to control the ...

Though we don’t yet know the extent of its threat, a widespread coronavirus epidemic in the United States is increasingly possible. In addition to the downright scary health consequences, we think the virus will quickly do serious damage to the U.S. economy, reducing growth in at least the first half of this year, pushing up unemployment ...

One of most enduring, economically and socially damaging, downright frustrating facts about life in the United States is how expensive health care is here. Not only does U.S. health care cost far more than in other advanced economies, but compared with the nations that spend less, we have worse or equivalent health outcomes. In fact, U.S. ...

The claim that automation is responsible for massive job losses has been made in almost every one of the Democratic debates. In the last debate, technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang told of automation closing stores on Main Street and of self-driving trucks that would shortly displace “3.5 million truckers or the 7 million Americans who work ...

In a recent reversal of a positive trend, the nation's factories have added almost no jobs on net over the past three months. Employment in the factory sector grew by more than 200,000 jobs last year, but in the past three months, it's up only 4,000. The number of total hours worked in the job market is also down over these past few months by ...

The US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature 2010 health-care reform, has succeeded in extending insurance coverage to millions of Americans who would not otherwise have it. And, contrary to critics' warnings, it has not pushed up health-care costs; in fact, there is some hope that the cost curve ...

A lot of people are talking about full employment these days. Lawrence Summers bemoaned its long-term absence at an important talk at the International Monetary Fund recently. Janet Yellen, nominated by President Obama to head the Federal Reserve, stressed that institution’s role in meeting the goal of full employment during her Senate ...

ASK most people in this city what the most important step is to increasing economic growth and job creation, and they’ll reply, “Reduce the budget deficit!”
They’re wrong. So-called austerity measures — lowering budget deficits while the economy is still weak — have been shown both here and in Europe to be precisely the wrong medicine. But ...

THE tinkering of federal government accountants is rarely newsmaking stuff. But after a few tweaks to the way the Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates the gross domestic product, those accountants have pulled off something seemingly remarkable: in the blink of an eye this week, they made the size of the American economy grow by $560 ...