The greater challenge facing US fiscal policy is not new: the US is running a primary (ex-interest) deficit much larger than has been the case historically, and it is happening at a point in the business cycle when the deficit would normally be smaller than usual. When interest expense rose sharply in the 1980s, fiscal policymakers reacted by shrinking the primary (ex-interest) deficit. The largest fiscal adjustment from that period, enacted in 1993, would be sufficient if enacted now to offset the additional interest expense we project (relative to 2021) after 5 years. The average interest rate on federal debt is likely to remain at or below the rate of nominal GDP growth for the next decade, and this relationship is likely to be more benign than the historical average over the next five years.

Related: Maxing Out and Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Living with High Public Debt

Maybe China is behind the rise in US long rates. Growth in China is slowing for cyclical and structural reasons, and Chinese exports to the US are lower. As a result, China has fewer dollars to recycle into Treasuries. In fact, China has been selling $300 billion in Treasuries since 2021, and the pace of Chinese selling has been faster in recent months. If slowing growth in China is a source of higher US rates—together with the US sovereign downgrade, Fed QT, Japan YCC exit, and rising US Treasury issuance—then a bad US employment report on Friday may not result in dramatically lower rates. The bottom line is that the cost of capital will likely stay permanently higher for reasons that have little to do with the business cycle, and it was the period with essentially zero interest rates from 2008 to 2020 that was unusual.

Related: Setser On Chinese "De-Dollarizing" and Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency and Sester On Sløk

Sløk's charts of the day are generally great but he forgot to adjust the major foreign holdings table for valuation changes, Euroclear, and Agencies.  The available data shows purchases for most of last year, sales in Q1, and a moderation of those sales in the last few months. Nothing dramatic. The Chinese data doesn't suggest informal PBOC reserves sales to date -- all the action has been through the state banks, and the sums there have been modest/the state banks wouldn't need to use their bonds to fund intervention. Has the Chinese bid for Treasuries stopped? No. But China has shifted toward Agencies and holds more of its Treasuries in offshore custodians. This should be the definitive flow chart --not a chart changing the valuation of US custodied Treasuries!

Related: Is China the Source of Higher US Long Rates? and Setser On Chinese "De-Dollarizing" and Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency

In currencies, the US dollar continued its recent rampaging strength, with the yen coming within a whisker of dropping below the level of Y150/$, at which many assume the Japanese authorities would feel obliged to step in to prop up the currency, as they did when it briefly topped that level a year ago. Any intervention by Japanese authorities would likely send yields further upward, so this is a reason for caution about betting on them to fall in short order. The logic is that the Federal Reserve will be happy for yields to rise until they “break something,” at which point bonds’ prices would rise as their yields fell. That makes sense, but if the first thing to break is the patience of the Ministry of Finance in Tokyo, then such a bet on buying bonds would lose money.

Related: BOJ Shock Has Wall Street Gaming Out the Global Spillovers and Why Are Long Rates Going Up? and Raising Anchor

U.S. petroleum product exports totaled nearly 6.0 million barrels per day (b/d) in the first half of 2023, 2% more than during the same period in 2022. The first half of 2023 saw the most U.S. petroleum product exports during the first six months of any year in our Petroleum Supply Monthly data, which date back to 1981. U.S. petroleum product exports increased significantly in the 2000s and 2010s because of a number of factors, including the increasing competitiveness and efficiency of production at U.S. refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast and increasing hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGLs) production associated with rising U.S. upstream oil and natural gas production.

Related: The Changing Nexus Between Commodity Prices and the Dollar: Causes and Implications and U.S. Oil Boom Blunts OPEC’s Pricing Power and Portfolio Nuclear

A new estimate of remote work from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that remote work is less common than previously thought. While the new BLS data reveals hybrid remote work to be substantially lower than other surveys estimated, fully remote work is close to where other surveys show, at around one out of ten workers.  As a result, fully remote work appears slightly more common than hybrid remote work.  Looking at the college-educated, nearly one in five are fully remote. Among advanced degree holders, nearly 40% are hybrid or fully remote. Among skilled workers, remote working is now a substantial share of the labor force, including fully remote.

Related: Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work and Remote Work, Three Years Later and Central Business Districts: City Strugglers

The pandemic sparked rapid, dramatic changes to the composition of consumer demand and to preferences for work and lifestyle, and these patterns have continued to evolve through mid-2023. From the standpoint of potential entrepreneurs, these dramatic changes presented opportunities—both to meet newly formed consumer and business needs and to change the career trajectories of the entrepreneurs themselves. Entrepreneurs made plans and applied to start businesses both early on and through mid-2023; some of these plans have resulted in new firms and establishments that hired workers in large numbers. Entrepreneurial opportunities and the demand for employees at these new firms appear to have played an important role in the “Great Resignation,” as some quitting workers likely flowed toward new businesses (as either entrepreneurs or new hires). Taken together, these patterns imply significant economic restructuring across industry, geography, and the firm size and age distribution.

Related: Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences and Creative Destruction After the Pandemic and Business Formation Boom

Each month life insurers receive insurance premium payments and pension funds receive employee contributions that they invest. These inflows are then filtered through investment policies and then allocated into a range of assets, including Treasuries. Over the past few years, this has translated into Treasury purchases at an annual rate of around $100b. This does not come close to meeting the trillions in coupons that will be issued each year for the foreseeable future. Real money managers will not be the marginal buyer of Treasuries that the market is looking for.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Maxing Out and Who Has Been Buying U.S. Treasury Debt?

What’s causing this interest rate spike? You might be tempted to see rising rates as a sign that investors are worried about inflation. But that’s not the story. We can infer market expectations of inflation from breakeven rates, the spread between interest rates on ordinary bonds and on bonds indexed for changes in consumer prices; these rates show that the market believes that inflation is under control. What we’re seeing instead is a sharp rise in real interest rates — interest rates minus expected inflation. At this point, real interest rates are well above 2%, up from yields usually below 1% before the pandemic. And if these higher rates are the new normal, they have huge and troubling implications. My instinct is to say that the bond market is overreacting to recent data and that high interest rates, like high inflation, will be transitory.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt? and American Gothic

If the [rising term premium] is not driven by changing Fed expectations, what are then the reasons why long rates are moving higher? There are several potential explanations: 1) First, with declining repo it could be an unwind of the basis trade that is pushing long rates higher, somewhat similar to what happened in March 2020. This has been getting a lot of attention, and maybe conditions for getting repo are tightening. 2) Another potential explanation is the slowing growth in China, which means that China is recycling fewer dollars into Treasuries because of declining Chinese exports. 3) Rates may also be moving higher because of the Fed still doing QT. Remember, the entire goal with QT is to put upward pressure on government bond yields. 4) The US budget deficit remains big at 6% of GDP, which requires more Treasury issuance today and in the future, and investors may be reacting to that. 5) The US sovereign downgrade has likely had a negative impact. 6) Japan exiting YCC has put upward pressure on JGB yields, which, despite high hedging costs, makes US yields less attractive. 7) There is a large stock of T-bills outstanding, and the Treasury intends over the next six months to increase auction sizes across the Treasury curve.

Related: Breaking Down the Sources of US Economic Resilience and Soft Landing Summer

There are two connected anomalies, or ‘elephants’, in World markets (1) huge capital inflows into the US$ and (2) a large negative term premia on US Treasuries. Both reflect the structural shortage of ‘safe’ assets in global financial markets. We are now in the early unwind stage. China needs to unhook from the US dollar by further devaluing the Yuan. She is unlikely, as a result, to buy a lot more US Treasuries. Unless the US authorities do something to cap rising yields, the current duration crisis could turn into a more worrying credit crisis. China, for one, has already started to print money again. We expect others to follow. 

Related: The US Capital Glut and Other Myths and The Return of Quantitative Easing and Unstable Prosperity: How Globalization Made the World Economy More Volatile

[The] headwind from rising yields should not be a surprise given that equity risk premia have fallen sharply back to pre pandemic levels, providing much less buffer for equities as rates rise (Exhibit 5). Some argue that this makes sense; if the post-pandemic tail-risk of deflation has now eroded, then equity risk premia should fall as term premia rises. However, while nominal and real bond yields are back to pre financial crisis levels, at least in the US, the PE remains much higher, and earnings growth much lower. In the absence of much better growth in corporate profits, the significant increase in both nominal and real interest rates create a much higher bar for equities to beat.

Related: Breaking Down the Sources of US Economic Resilience and Soft Landing Summer and The Price of Risk: With Equity Risk Premiums, Caveat Emptor!

By 2022, the prices of new homes sold in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen were 1.73 times, 1.81 times, 1.80 times, and 1.97 times their 2014 levels, respectively. The value of China’s housing market is four times the country’s GDP, compared to 1.6 in the US and 2.1 in Japan. Accounting for more than one-quarter of all economic activity and two-thirds of household wealth. Now that China’s total population is shrinking, especially the home-buying-age cohort, the collapse of the property dam seems inevitable.

Related: How China Can Avoid the Japan Trap and Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and The Neoclassical Growth of China

From 1992 to 2010, American adults with and without a four-year college degree saw falling mortality, but with greater improvements for the more educated; from 2010 to 2019, mortality continued to fall for those with a BA while rising for those without; during the COVID pandemic, mortality rose for both groups, but markedly more rapidly for the less educated. In consequence, the mortality gap between the two groups expanded in all three periods, leading to an 8.5-year difference in adult life expectancy by the end of 2021. One remarkable finding here is that Americans with a college degree, if they were a separate country, would be one of the best performers, just below Japan, though there was some decline in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic.

Related: Why Are Americans Dying So Young? and Who Won the Cold War? Part II and Who Won the Cold War? Part III

Nominal bank lending growth has slowed from 10% to 2% since the start of this year on a 3-month annualized basis, for two main reasons. First, deposit outflows and higher deposit rates have led banks to reduce lending to a degree roughly in line with the usual historical relationships. Second, recession fears have likely led banks to reduce lending, and we find that banks that built up more provisions for loan losses over the last year have slowed lending by more. We expect the drag on growth from tighter bank lending standards to fade because we expect bank lending standards to remain roughly unchanged in Q3—as fading recession fears and modestly higher bank stock prices roughly offset higher interest rates—and to start to normalize gradually next year.

Related: All Clear and Outlook for Regional Banks and Real-Estate Doom Loop Threatens America’s Banks

While stimulus was an important factor in limiting credit card-financed spending earlier in the pandemic, in recent times the strength of the labor market and the associated wage gains are likely a major reason why consumers have not had to resort to hitting their credit cards harder. Exhibit 7 shows that according to Bank of America internal data, average credit card balances have risen over the last few years, after a dip in 2020. The latest reading through August 2023 suggests that for middle- and higher-income households, credit card balances are at levels equivalent to that in 2019. However, card balances for lower-income households have seen a steeper rise and have exceeded their pre-pandemic range. The good news is that lower-income households continue to see faster wage growth, as suggested by Exhibit 8, which helps offset some of the pressure that the group is facing from higher card balances.

Related: The Pandemic Has Broken a Closely Followed Survey of Sentiment and What Has Policy Tightening Accomplished So Far? and The Q4 Pothole: Student Loans, Shutdown, and Strikes

The world’s top exporter of corn, soy, and wheat for much of the past seven decades, the US is now facing a future of persistent agricultural trade deficits. The shortfall for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is estimated at $19 billion and is expected to balloon to almost $28 billion in fiscal 2024, according to Agriculture Department forecasts. The trend is driven in part by a shift in Americans’ eating habits—for instance, households today consume more imported produce, such as Mexican avocados and Indian mangoes—but stagnating grain and oilseed exports are also a factor. Since 1974 the only other annual deficits were in 2019 and 2020, during President Donald Trump’s trade war with China.

Related: China Expands Farmland In Bid To Cut Foreign Food Reliance and Could Economic Indicators Signal China’s Intent To Go To War?

The ballooning bilateral deficit is entirely driven by a rise in imports rather than a fall in exports; the two grew more or less in parallel at the end of the last decade. Then, after the first lockdown-related swings, EU exports to China remained more or less stable, while imports soared. The change in imports is visible across broad categories of manufacturing, although machinery and transport equipment (think of China’s electric car boom) may be contributing more than its proportionate share. [In 2023] all of these changes have recently been going into reverse. Import volumes have fallen by about 10% since the peak in August last year; import prices by about 15%. The total import bill, consequently, is down by about quarter since a year ago.

Related: The Chinese Carmakers Planning to Shake Up The European Market and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and Europe Can’t Decide How to Unplug from China

US exposure to foreign supply chains is much bigger than it appears at face value, but it is not that big on the macro level. By any measure, the US buys at least 80% of all industrial inputs from domestic sources. Thus, at an aggregate level, its foreign exposure is hardly alarming. However, while this may be reassuring, it is important to note that supply chain disruptions rarely occur at the macro level. The 80% figure was not relevant when the US auto sector shuttered factories due to a lack of semiconductors, or when buying home office electronics became problematic due to a demand surge and logistic snarls. Taking account of the Chinese inputs into all the inputs that American manufacturers buy from other foreign suppliers – what we call look through exposure – we see that US exposure to China is almost four times larger than it appears to be at face value.

Related: Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and US-China Trade is Close to a Record, Defying Talk of Decoupling

The term premium is up one percentage point since late July. The ongoing rise in long rates is driven less by changing Fed expectations and more by: 1) The US sovereign downgrade 2) Japan exiting YCC 3) Fed QT 4) Fewer dollars for China to recycle in a falling exports environment 5) The US budget deficit 6) The large stock of T-bills and the Treasury’s intention to increase auction sizes. Looking ahead, the real risk to the economy, including financial stability, is if weak economic data doesn’t result in falling long-term interest rates.

Related: Maxing Out and Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Living with High Public Debt

I would suggest that substantial and accumulating deficits and debts are a substantial threat to national security and national power. A reasonable calculation would suggest that our budget prospects are vastly worse than they were at the time of the Clinton administration's successful budget actions and substantially worse than they were at the time of the Simpson-Bowles efforts. The budget deficits a decade out comfortably in double digits as a share of GDP now seem a reasonable projection with primary deficits quite likely in the 5% of GDP range. This is without the assumption of the need for vast mobilization for meeting contingencies, military or non-military. And I think it is reasonable to ask the question. How long can or will the world's greatest debtor be able to maintain its position as the world's greatest power?

Related: Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates and Interest Rates Hit 16-Year Record and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?

US households saved some $1.1 trillion less than previously thought over the past six years, according to revised government data released Thursday. The Bureau of Economic Analysis now calculates that Americans stashed away an average 8.3% of their disposable income annually from 2017 through 2022, down from a previously estimated 9.4%. The reduction stems from an accounting adjustment that lowered personal income from mutual funds and real estate investment trusts.

Europeans are using our high taxes to fund social transfers, not public sector investments. Innovators are therefore confronted with the worst of all worlds: a capital market not fit for purpose, high taxes, and low public sector investments.  For a capital-markets driven system of innovation, you require a complete reboot of your entire socio-economic system. You would need to replace your pay-as-you go pension systems with pension funds. You would have to stop subsidising old industries and let them fall over the cliff. You would need lower rates of corporate taxes, which you can only have through cuts in social transfers. You would also need to raise public investment spending. It is safe to predict that this will not happen, not even during a long-lasting period of economic decline. We know the politics of decline.

Related: How The US Is Crushing Europe’s Domestic Exchanges and From Strength To Strength and Europe Has Fallen Behind America and the Gap is Growing

Annual births fell from 18.83 million in 2016 to 17.65 million, 15.23 million, 14.65 million, 12.02 million in 2020, 10.62 million, and 9.56 million last year. Therefore, the rate of decline each year from 2017 to 2022 was 6.27%, 13.71%, 3.81%, 17.95%, 11.65%, and 9.98%, respectively. The number of women of childbearing age is decreasing. Based on the seventh national census data, the number of women of childbearing age is expected to decline by about 4 million annually from 2020 to 2025.

Related: China’s Fertility Rate Dropped Sharply, Study Shows and China’s Collapsing Birth and Marriage Rates Reflect a People’s Deep Pessimism and China’s Defeated Youth

Gross investment has typically been 20-25% of GDP over time, although in recent years it’s been closer to the lower end of that range. From the 1950s up into the 1980s, net investment was (very roughly) 10% of GDP. Thus, it was plausible to say that in a typical year, a little more than half of gross investment went to replace capital that was wearing out, and a little less than half of gross investment was actually new, net investment growing the capital stock. But in the last decade or so, gross investment has been about 20% of GDP, and net investment has fallen to about 5% of GDP. In other words, gross investment as a share of GDP has fallen a bit, but not too much. The real change is that about three-quarters of investment is now going to replace capital that has worn out, so net investment is much lower.

Related: Capital Allocation

We examined the spread between return on invested capital (ROIC) and weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for companies that did an initial public offering from 1990 to 2022. We expected to see low or negative spreads between ROIC and WACC for companies newly listed, rising spreads as they mature, and a decline in senescence. But what we found was nearly the opposite. The spread at the date of the IPO was high and narrowed before stabilizing around year five.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Data Update 5 for 2023: Pathways to Profitability

Using testing data from over two million students in nearly 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus the District of Columbia), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of the widening gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in person (although reading gaps did). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020–2021 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on helping students recover from pandemic-related academic achievement losses.

Related: Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind in School Their Kids Are and NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics

Households are paying down their mortgage debt. As of July 2023, mortgage loans accounted for over 50% of total household debt ($6 trillion and a third of GDP). Over the past year, the amount of mortgage loans outstanding has declined for the first time ever in China as households have prioritized mortgage repayments. Note that other forms of consumer credit have also slowed sharply.  The lockdown’s impact on consumer spending helped push up deposits in the 2020-21 period. New deposit growth has accelerated notably over the past year.

Related: China Is Now Growing Slower Than the U.S. and China Must Slow Down Investment If It Wants To Rebalance its Debt-Laden Economy and China’s Defeated Youth

Acceptance rates at top Chinese universities are estimated to be below 0.01% for students in some provinces and around 0.5% for those in major municipalities such as Beijing and Shanghai. For comparison, Harvard College had an acceptance rate of 3.41% this year. During China’s large-scale privatization process, older workers struggled to find new employment in the rapidly changing economy. But now, employers are reluctant to lay off older workers – both because they have valuable experience and because they are protected by labor laws. The contraction in jobs therefore is felt most acutely among young people.

Related: Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and The Root of China’s Growing Youth Unemployment Crisis and China’s Defeated Youth

China is in fact hyper-capitalist. An enormous proportion of national income goes to the controllers of capital and is being saved by them. During the earlier hypergrowth period, this worked well. But now the savings are far greater than can be productively used. Income now needs to accrue to those who will spend it. The danger is not one of a huge financial crisis: China is a creditor country; its debts are overwhelmingly in its own currency; and its government owns all the important banks. A policy of financial repression would work quite well. The danger is rather one of chronically weak demand. It will be impossible, in today’s global environment, to generate either a huge export boom or consistent current account surpluses. The investment rate is already spectacularly high, while growth is slowing. Still higher non-property investment cannot be justified.

Related: An Economic Hail Mary for China and Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and The Neoclassical Growth of China

Equities have been sustained by the anomaly of equity valuations rising at a time of muted earnings growth, and the AI catalyst. The major US equity catalyst this year has been the rise in AI-linked stocks. They’ve come off the boil since July, but there’s still a lot of optimism regarding AI’s impact on growth, profits and productivity. All of these use cases have created a frenzy of analysts comparing large language models and other generative AI to 20th century milestones such as the electrification of farms, the interstate highway system and the internet itself.

Related: Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier and Generative AI at Work and AI, Mass Evolution, and Weickian Loops

Rather quietly, inflows from official investors came close to generating about half of the net inflows needed to sustain the United States' current account deficit (over the last 4qs of data, q3 23 may be different). A lot of the inflow over the last 4qs (q3 22 to q2 23) has gone into equities and bank deposits so it doesn't get the attention of Treasury flows. But q2 23 Treasury inflows were substantial as well. Total foreign demand for LT US bonds (official and private, including private demand for corporate bonds) exceeded the US current account deficit in q1 2023. The fall in reported foreign holdings last year though got a lot more attention. The IMF's data for global reserves isn't available (yet) for q2, but central banks added to their dollar holdings in q1 (and likely q2). They are getting a lot of coupon payments on their existing stock-- and reinvesting I assume.

Related: Setser On Chinese "De-Dollarizing" and Saudi Arabia's PIF and the New Petrodollar Recycling and Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires companies with 100 or more employees to report their workforce demographics every year. Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms. In total, they increased their US workforces by 323,094 people in 2021, the first year after the Black Lives Matter protests — and the most recent year for which this data exists. The overall job growth included 20,524 White workers. The other 302,570 jobs — or 94% of the headcount increase — went to people of color. Many people just starting out in their career are from growing Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations, who are entering the workforce just as more tenured White employees retire. That, however, can’t fully account for changes, particularly at the top of the corporate ladder.

Related: Biggest Pay Raises Went to Black Workers, Young People and Low-Wage Earners and Rebound in Immigration Comes to Economy’s Aid and Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995

Figure 1 shows that the median forecast of professional economists for one-year-ahead consumer price index (CPI) inflation has become less sensitive to actual CPI inflation. The figure shows the results of regressions measuring the strength of the relationship between one-year-ahead expected CPI inflation (vertical axis) and the contemporaneous four-quarter CPI inflation rate (horizontal axis). For the period from 1949 through the end of 1998, the blue line indicates a strong relationship with a slope of 0.71, implying that the median inflation forecast adjusts nearly one-for-one with actual inflation. The regression yields a much smaller slope of 0.18 for the period from 1999 through the second quarter of 2023 (red line), implying very little forecast adjustment in response to actual inflation.

Related: What We’ve Learned About Inflation

Commercial real-estate insurance costs have risen 7.6% annually on average since 2017, according to Moody’s Analytics. Costs to insure rental-apartment buildings rose 14.4% annually on average in Dallas, 13% in Los Angeles and 12.6% in Houston. Some owners struggle to find anyone willing to insure their buildings, Moody’s said. Intensifying natural disasters are a big reason for the increase, particularly in cities vulnerable to wildfires, floods or storms. The cost of reinsurance has also increased, trickling down to higher property insurance rates. Meanwhile, inflation has pushed up the cost of repairing or rebuilding damaged properties.

Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and Rising Insurance Costs Start to Hit Home Sales and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters

The 5.3 point shift between 2016 and 2020–just enough to tilt the state to Biden—was driven by three factors: 2016 third-party voters switching to Biden in 2020, Black population growth and white population decline, and persuasion, primarily among high-income, high-education voters. The total shift in Georgia due to persuasion is about 3.1 points—and 2.2 points comes from the changes in the composition of the electorate. Georgia as a whole is not demographically favorable to Donald Trump: unlike the upper Midwest, there are fewer white working-class voters left for him to flip, and a lot of cross pressured college-educated white Republicans. If Trump’s path with suburban whites is closed off, Trump has another option: continuing to chip away at Democratic margins among African Americans, as current polls suggest he might. Trump would likely need a bigger breakthrough with Black voters than he’s gotten to date to fully counteract the effect of the state’s Black population growth.

Related: The Road to A Political Realignment in American Politics and Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

The Pentagon’s goal must contend with booming demand in the commercial aerospace market that has left a shortage of skilled labor, raw materials, and parts such as advanced electronics and fasteners. The Pentagon wants to buy thousands of cheap drones in as little as 18 months, and as many as 2,000 larger uncrewed jets. By contrast, one of its primary drone suppliers, Shield AI, produced 38 of the aircraft last year. The emerging air taxi makers present another challenge. Roughly a dozen companies are vying to develop propeller-driven vehicles that can take off and land like helicopters, potentially cutting journey times in New York City, Los Angeles, and other big urban areas. Flush with cash from venture capital, stock offerings, and military contracts, the sector is moving closer to large-scale production.

Related: Pentagon Plans Vast AI Fleet to Counter China Threat and Rocket Motor Shortage Curbs Weapons for Ukraine and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity

Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks people in dozens of countries where they would place themselves on a scale from the zero-sum belief that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”, to the positive-sum view that “wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone”. The average response among those in high-income countries has become 20% more zero-sum over the last century. Moreover, two distinct rises in the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes have coincided with two slowdowns in gross domestic product growth, one in the 1970s and another in the past two decades. The same pattern holds within individual countries. Britons and Americans have become significantly more likely to believe that success is a matter of luck rather than effort precisely as income growth has slowed. 

Related: Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides and Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics

Zero-sum thinking is associated with more preference for liberal economic policies in general and with stronger political alignment with the Democratic Party and weaker alignment with the Republican Party. We also find that zero-sum thinking is linked empirically to important political crises experienced in the United States. Specifically, we find that individuals who view the world in zero-sum terms are more likely to believe that the conspiracy theory QAnon holds some truth for U.S. politics. We also find that zero-sum thinking is linked with empathy and understanding for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, an act that is more justifiable and seen as being less harmful if one presumes the world is zero-sum (rather than positive/negative sum).

Related: Are We Destined For A Zero-Sum Future? and Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics

This paper hypothesizes that the decline of the Rust Belt was due in large part to the persistent labor market conflict that was prevalent throughout the region’s main industries. [Labor conflict] results in lower investment and productivity growth, which causes employment to move from the Rust Belt to the rest of the country. The model also features rising foreign competition as an alternative source of the Rust Belt’s decline. Quantitatively, labor conflict accounts for around half of the decline in the Rust Belt’s share of manufacturing employment. Consistent with the data, the model predicts that the Rust Belt’s employment share stabilizes by the mid 1980s, once labor conflict subsides. Rising foreign competition plays a more modest role quantitatively, and its effects are concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s, after most of the Rust Belt’s decline had already occurred.

Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South

As measured in the CES data, manufacturing average hourly wages for all employees were 3% above wages in the private sector in 2006, a difference commonly known as the manufacturing wage premium. Since then, manufacturing wages have averaged gains of 2.3% per year, while wages in the private sector have risen 2.6% per year. While manufacturing workers used to receive a premium relative to workers in other sectors, that premium has disappeared in recent years for most manufacturing jobs. Our results indicate that the decline in unionization rates is responsible for more than 70% of the drop in the manufacturing wage premium. Notably, the unionization effect remains significant even after accounting for a large set of worker and sectoral characteristics.

Related: American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough and The World Is In The Grip Of A Manufacturing Delusion and Unpacking the Boom in U.S. Construction of Manufacturing Facilities

The Treasury market may be entering a period of volatility as leveraged investors have stalled in their purchases and the next marginal buyer has not yet arrived. When the Fed and commercial banks stepped away from the Treasury market, hedge funds stepped in and bought cash Treasuries in size as part of a cash futures basis trade. The financing for that trade is sourced through dealer repo, which grew rapidly and then stalled. While dealers themselves have access to virtually unlimited financing from the Fed, the size of their activity is constrained by balance sheet costs. If the leveraged buyers are reaching financing limits, then a new marginal Treasury buyer must emerge to absorb the sizable upcoming issuance.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Who Has Been Buying U.S. Treasury Debt? and Raising Anchor

US equities account for nearly 70% of the MSCI World index; the next five largest — in Japan, UK, France, Canada, and Germany — total less than 20%. The top 10 constituent equities of the MSCI World index, which are all US companies including Apple at number one and ExxonMobil at number 10, aggregate to more than 20%. To put it bluntly, the 10 most valuable US equities are larger than the market capitalisations of Japan, UK, France, Canada, and Germany combined. In effect, the US has scaled up the largest companies in the world in its own public markets, creating a colossal pool of recyclable equity capital residing in domestic and non-US investor portfolios. This has created a virtuous cycle of new listings from US and overseas issuers attracted by the depth and liquidity of that equity pool.

Related: Europe Has Fallen Behind America and the Gap is Growing and Why Europe’s Stock Markets Are Failing to Challenge the US and From Strength To Strength

Stabilizing the federal debt at 100% of GDP over the long term—which would far exceed the post-1960 average of 45% of GDP—would require non-interest savings beginning at 2% of GDP and ramping up to 5% of GDP over the next three decades. (The resulting interest savings from a smaller debt would provide the rest of the savings.) These figures assume the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts (as there is strong bipartisan support for extending the tax cuts for the bottom-earning 98% of earners) but do not assume any additional spending expansions, tax cuts, or economic crises—all of which would also have to be fully offset to meet this debt target. In short, the non-interest savings required to stabilize the debt will almost surely rise past 5% of GDP when accounting for additional spending and tax-cut legislation. Taxing the rich cannot close more than a small fraction of this gap.

Related: Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy and American Gothic and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Treasury 10-year yields rose above 4.5% for the first time since 2007 as a more hawkish Federal Reserve adds to concern the bonds face a toxic mix of large US fiscal deficits and persistent inflation. Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management says he remains short bonds because he expects long-term rates to rise further. “The long-term inflation rate plus the real rate of interest plus term premium suggests that 5.5% is an appropriate yield for 30-year Treasurys.” The yield on 30-year debt climbed as much as one basis point Friday to 4.59%, adding to the 13 basis-point jump on Thursday that took it to the highest since 2011.

Related: 31% of All US Government Debt Outstanding Matures within 12 Months and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Even if wage growth did normalize, it is not clear why interest rates would need to fall much, if at all, in a world of 2% real growth, 2% inflation, and healthy private sector balance sheets. Real yields on 5-year Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) are currently about 0.5 percentage point higher than 5-year real yields starting five years from now. But from 2003 until the pandemic, spot 5-year real rates were about 1pp lower than forward rates. (This includes the flat curve years of 2006-7 and 2018-2019, when the spread was more or less zero.) If further-forward real yields were poised to revert to this longer-term average, then that would have implications for a range of asset prices.

Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and BIS Quarterly Review

Since the Fed started hiking rates last year, US households have bought $1.5 trillion in Treasuries, and over the past six months, US pension and insurance have also emerged as a buyer. Over the same period, the Fed has been doing QT and been a net seller of Treasuries. The bottom line is that US households and real money are finding current levels of US yields attractive.

Related: Demand for Treasuries and Trapped Liquidity and Raising Anchor

Real interest rates have risen across the yield curve after stalling out between late 2022 and the first half of 2023. Importantly, the real yield curve remains relatively flat—implying that real interest rates are slated to remain at roughly their near-term levels for the foreseeable future. For real interest rates to stay around their current levels of about 2% and inflation to remain at the target of 2% would imply a long-run natural rate of between 4 and 4.5% (after accounting for the difference between CPI and the Fed’s preferred PCE inflation adjustments). Again, that is higher than even the highest estimate put forward by a FOMC participant yesterday.

Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19 and In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments!

This year, average monthly growth in the foreign-born labor force is about 65,000 higher compared with 2022 on a seasonally adjusted basis, a  Goldman Sachs analysis found. After plunging at the start of the pandemic, the size of the foreign-born labor force has rebounded, nearing 32 million people in August.  Foreign-born workers’ share of the labor force—those working or looking for work—reached 18% in 2022, the highest level on record going back to 1996, according to the Labor Department. It has climbed further this year to an average of 18.5% through August, not adjusted for seasonal variation.

Related: Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995 and Immigration Playing a Key Role in the Labor Market and Immigration and U.S. Labor Market Tightness: Is There a Link?

In Florida the average home insurance premium in 2023 is around $6,000, more than three times the national average and up 42% year-on-year. Yet rather than drooling over juicy profits, insurers are fleeing. With 1.3m policies, the state-backed insurer of last resort now has the highest market share in Florida and is insuring assets worth $608bn. The Golden State is following the Sunshine State into market failure, but for different reasons. Though California is a pricey place to live, property insurance is relatively cheap thanks to strict consumer-protection laws. Regulations prevent insurers from raising premiums high enough to cover inflation, increasing wildfire risk and rising reinsurance rates.

Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters and Rising Insurance Costs Start to Hit Home Sales

There is no good evidence that China has reduced its exposure to the dollar. In fact, if you account for the higher dollar share of China's hidden reserves, its USD likely has increased since 2014. I am pretty sure that over the last year China hasn't shifted its reserves out of the dollar. It has shifted from US custodied Treasuries to offshore custodians and risk assets (Agencies, equities).  When China stops targeting 60% for the dollar share of its formal reserves, we will know.  The interesting question is what is the dollar share of China's shadow reserves -- and I think the answer is that it is a lot higher than the dollar share of China's formal reserves.

Related: Shadow Reserves — How China Hides Trillions of Dollars of Hard Currency and Great Power Conflict Puts the Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege Under Threat and Pettis On Pozsar

Almost 90% of surveyed Americans say people shouldn’t be judged for moving back home, according to Harris Poll in an exclusive survey for Bloomberg News. It’s seen as a pragmatic way to get ahead, the survey of 4,106 adults in August showed. Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 drove the share of young adults living with parents or grandparents to nearly 50%, a record high. These days, about 23 million, or 45%, of all Americans ages 18 to 29 are living with family, roughly the same level as the 1940s, a time when women were more likely to remain at home until marriage and men too were lingering on family farms in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Related: Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year and Young Adults in the U.S. Are Reaching Key Life Milestones Later Than in the Past and Americans’ Ideal Family Size Is Larger Than the Birthrate Suggests

Democrats have been posting special-election overperformances of that magnitude all year long, in all kinds of districts. And on average, they have won by margins 11 points higher than the weighted relative partisanship of their districts. The types of people who vote in low-turnout special elections tend to be different from the types of people who vote in regularly scheduled elections: Lower turnout generally means a more college-educated electorate, and college graduates have gotten more Democratic in recent years. That could be why special-election overperformance has consistently been a couple of points more Democratic than the House popular vote over the past three cycles. However, college graduates were disproportionately Democratic in 2020 and 2022 too, and Democrats didn’t consistently do this well in special elections in those cycles. So something seems to be different this time that the education realignment doesn’t fully explain.

Related: Is a Trump-Biden Rematch Inevitable? and Trump’s Electoral College Edge Seems to Be Fading and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

Patent concentration, which can affect diffusion, has risen over the past several decades with a concurrent surge in patent litigation cases. In the post-1980 period, a parallel trend concerning patents in the U.S. has been the dramatic increase in the number of patent cases filed, which some authors have dubbed the “patent litigation explosion.” The annual number of litigation cases filed per 100 granted patents rises from about 1.2 in the early 1990s to an average of about 1.5 between 1995 and 2010, before rising again to more than 1.8 between 2010 and 2015 and only receding marginally since then.

Related: Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Since 2009, manufacturing output per hour in the U.S. has grown just 0.2% a year, well below the economy as a whole and peer economies in Europe and Asia, except Japan. In motor vehicle manufacturing, the picture is especially bad: From 2012 through last year, productivity plummeted 32%, though some of this was no doubt due to pandemic disruptions.  Warehouses and hospitals can pass the cost of higher wages and reduced hours to customers without being undercut by foreign competitors. Manufacturers don’t have that luxury. That’s why Detroit is recoiling at the UAW’s demands. While their output per employee is among the highest of 11 global manufacturers ranked by consultants AlixPartners, so are their costs per vehicle. The lowest cost: China’s.

Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South

We discuss how Large Language Models (LLM) can improve experimental design, including improving the elicitation wording, coding experiments, and producing documentation. Second, we discuss the implementation of experiments using LLM, focusing on enhancing causal inference by creating consistent experiences, improving comprehension of instructions, and monitoring participant engagement in real time. Third, we highlight how LLMs can help analyze experimental data, including pre-processing, data cleaning, and other analytical tasks while helping reviewers and replicators investigate studies. Each of these tasks improves the probability of reporting accurate findings

Related: Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier and Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Generative AI at Work

Joe Biden is likely to be the Democratic nominee. I would put his chances in the range of 80 to 85%. Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. I would put his chances in the range of 75%. The chance of an average non-Hispanic white man of Biden’s age (80) dying in the next year is about 5%. Biden’s odds are presumably lower than this, however. Even if he’s lost a step or two, I feel comfortable asserting that his physical and mental health are better than that of the typical 80-year-old. However, there are a lot of medical events other than Biden literally passing away that might end his bid for a second term. Overall, I figure there’s a 10% chance that Trump loses the nomination in “typical” fashion, such as being caught from behind in Iowa, a 5% chance that a health-related issue ends his campaign, and a 10% chance that legal jeopardy forces Trump to reconsider or compels Republicans to turn on him, even though they haven’t so far.

Related: Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024 and For Some Key Voters, Trump Has Become Toxic and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

Since the 1970s, trust in government has been consistently higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among the opposition party. Republicans have often been more reactive than Democrats to changes in political leadership, with Republicans expressing much lower levels of trust during Democratic presidencies; Democrats’ attitudes have tended to be somewhat more consistent, regardless of which party controls the White House. However, the GOP and Democratic shifts in attitudes from the end of Donald Trump’s presidency to the start of Joe Biden’s were roughly the same magnitude.

Related: Collapsing Social Trust is Driving American Gun Violence

The pandemic led to a surge in new business formations. What is striking to us is that this elevated level has continued post-Covid. According to data from the Census Bureau, in July, high-propensity business applications, which include all those that are more likely to become businesses with a payroll, were 40% higher than the average level in 2019.  While not all of these businesses survive (the number of business deaths also rose in 2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), the net impact still points to strong growth in business formation. Business applications each year seem to be driven by a different sector. At the start of the pandemic, retail trade saw the biggest surge, driven largely by the growing demand for e-commerce, according to commentaries from the Census Bureau.

Related: Surging Business Formation in the Pandemic: Causes and Consequences and The Startup Surge Continues: Business Applications on Track for Second-Largest Annual Total on Record and Creative Destruction After the Pandemic

To get rates back up to the 12% pre-pandemic level would require adding 2.7 million new housing units—more than the entire housing stock of the state of Maryland or more than 1.5 years of construction at 2022 rates—and leaving them all empty. Assume half occupancy and America needs 6.2 million new units—more than currently exist in Pennsylvania. If you assume that 75% of units will get filled on net then America needs more than 18 million additional housing units—roughly as many as exist in California and Washington state combined. Actual construction stood at only 1.4 million in the first half of 2023, failing to keep up with demand and leading to further declines in unoccupied housing rates—in other words, the structural shortage of housing is keeping prices high and vacancies down.

Related: Repeat After Me: Building Any New Homes Reduces Housing Costs For All and On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and Have Rising Mortgage Rates Frozen the Housing Market?

All these areas clearly do have much higher WFH shares than the nation as a whole. What else do they have in common? One striking characteristic, which I highlighted in the top-50 table, is that most are located in central cities of metropolitan areas, which are designated as such based on population and how many people commute to jobs there. What’s more, two non-central cities on the list — Cupertino, California, and Redmond, Washington — happen to be home to the headquarters of the two most valuable companies in the world, Apple and Microsoft, and several others are also home to large corporate headquarters. Working at home seems to be most popular in places close to lots of offices and other places of employment.

'Related: Remote Work, Three Years Later and Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse and Real-Estate Doom Loop Threatens America’s Banks

Using UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a filter, Bloomberg Economics found that the global share of greenfield foreign direct investment going to countries that didn't condemn the invasion averaged only 15% in the last two years, down from 30% in the decade to 2019. China's share, including Hong Kong, fell to less than 2% in 2022 from nearly 11% on average over 2010-19. The data point to US and other Western companies investing more in like-minded countries. Between the second quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of this year, US companies’ greenfield investments in China plunged 57.9% and those by European firms dropped 36.7% versus the five years leading up to the pandemic, an updated IMF analysis shared with Bloomberg found. Investments from the rest of Asia into China were down by more than two-thirds.

Related: Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives to Chinese Manufacturing

Xin Meng of the Australian National University appears to refute the “demographic dividend” as an explanation for China’s economic success.  Her analysis showed that between 1982 and 2015 China’s working-age population, defined as those aged between 16 and 65, grew from 600m to 1bn. During this same period, however, labour-force participation dropped from 85% to just over 70%. Much of the decline came from those with an urban hukou. Unlike holders of rural hukou, urbanites were subjected to mandatory retirement at the age of 55 for women and 65 for men. Compulsory education and greater university enrolment kept under-25s out of the workforce.

Related: Population Aging and Economic Growth: From Demographic Dividend to Demographic Drag? and The Chinese Century Is Already Over and The Neoclassical Growth of China

For decades now, the Chinese government has encouraged university enrollment, pushing the number of students in higher education from 22 million in 1990 to 383 million in 2021.  During the pandemic, it pressed even harder, expanding graduate-school capacity.  Master’s-degree candidates rose by 25 percent in 2021.  China’s Ministry of Education estimated that 10.76 million college students would graduate in 2022, 1.67 million more than in 2021—and it expects a further large rise in 2023. The message for China’s policymakers is clear: boosting graduate numbers while throttling services and subsidizing buildings is bad economics and worse social policy. 

Related: Why Has Youth Unemployment Risen So Much in China? and China Cannot Allow Jobless Young To ‘Lie Flat’ and China’s Defeated Youth

The path of policy rates priced into futures markets in major Advanced Economies became more in line with the cautious tone of central banks. The Federal Reserve and the ECB raised policy rates further in July, and emphasized in their communications that future decisions would be data-dependent. Officials also indicated that, while rates might not rise much more, they could stay at their current levels for a prolonged period if inflation remained above target. In accordance with these messages, futures markets in both in the US and the euro area priced in higher rates for 2024 than they had just a few months before. And the expected peak in policy rates was pushed higher and later. That said, investors still seemed to anticipate rate cuts as early as the second quarter of 2024, and much deeper in the US than the euro area.

Related: Adrift at Sea and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest After COVID-19

While Treasuries remain the most liquid security in the world, they are structurally becoming less liquid. The average daily cash transactions in Treasuries has not come close to scaling with the overall growth in issuance. Although average daily cash volumes have increased slightly in recent years to $700b, that increase is in part due to the activity of principal trading firms whose strategy is to profit from small intraday fluctuations in price. These firms account for 20% of cash market volumes, but they disappear when volatility picks up so their provision of liquidity is illusory. Excluding their participation, cash market activity would be progressively thinning relative to the steady growth in issuance.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and Raising Anchor and Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market

The hand-wringing about the Great Maturity Wall appears to have been wildly overdone. A year ago, the bear case held that interest rates were rising and the economy was deteriorating at the same time that a surfeit of high-yield debt was coming due. But ever since that point, companies have been quietly extending their debt calendars. At the start of 2023, high-yield issuers had about $878.4 billion in significant dollar-denominated bond and loan issues coming due through 2025. And since then, issuers have whittled the number down by about 38% to $542.3 billion. Most signs suggest they will continue to make plodding progress.

Related: Rates Are Up. We’re Just Starting to Feel the Heat and A Default Cycle Has Started and Credit Normalization

For the last several months, I have been part of a team of social scientists working with Boston Consulting Group, turning their offices into the largest pre-registered experiment on the future of professional work in our AI-haunted age. For 18 different tasks selected to be realistic samples of the kinds of work done at an elite consulting company, consultants using ChatGPT-4 outperformed those who did not, by a lot. On every dimension. Every way we measured performance. Consultants using AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without. [AI] works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43% when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one.

Related: Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment and Generative AI at Work and AI, Mass Evolution, and Weickian Loops

The increase in disability reporting has been especially pronounced among people aged 25-54 (the so-called prime-age population). This group has also seen its disability rate rise by about 0.9pp but from a lower base. This increase brings the prime-age disability rate to 6.9% over the last three months, corresponds to nearly 1.3mm additional prime-age people with disabilities, and represents a 16% increase in that population. Even though cognitive difficulties are more common among older people, the increases in cognitive difficulties seen since the onset of the pandemic have been driven by younger people. Since February 2020, rates of cognitive difficulties have increased by about 1.1 percentage points among people 16-24 and 25-34 and by 0.7 percentage points among people 35-44, in each case representing at least a 25 percent increase in prevalence.

Related: The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere and Youth Risk Behavior Survey

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has appealed for greater European support as her country confronts a surge of people fleeing north Africa, amid growing tensions between Rome and other EU capitals over migration policy. More than 12,000 people have reached Italy in the past week, mostly to the island of Lampedusa, authorities said, with thousands more awaiting to make the relatively short journey from Tunisia’s port city of Sfax to the Italian island. The increased influx is a political headache for Meloni, who was elected on a promise to stop the flow of illegal migration to Italy. Instead, the number of those arriving on Italian shores has surged to more than 128,600 so far this year, up from around 66,200 at the same time last year.

Related: Saudi Forces Accused of Killing Hundreds of Ethiopian Migrants and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World and Demography Is Destiny in Africa

The over-80s for the first time accounted for more than 10% of Japan’s population, according to a government report.  Japan’s persistently low birthrate and long lifespans have made it the oldest country in the world in terms of the proportion of people aged over 65, which this year hit a record of 29.1%. Japan’s overall population fell by about half a million to 124.4 million, according to the report. It’s expected to tumble to less than 109 million by 2045.

Related: Inflation in The *Very* Long Run and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and More Than 40% of Japanese Women May Never Have Children

Meanwhile, spending at stores, restaurants, and online excluding grocery stores and gas stations has been rising at a yearly rate of 7% each month on average since the spring, compared to 4% a year in 2017-2019. That is consistent with underlying wage growth, which is still rising about 2 percentage points faster than before the pandemic, despite the normalization in job market churn, the declining wage bump for people switching jobs, and the slowdown in the growth of posted wages on job boards.

Related: Breaking Down the Sources of US Economic Resilience and Soft Landing Summer and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

The United Auto Workers union for the first time ever went on strike at all three Detroit car companies, with about 12,700 workers hitting the picket lines shortly after midnight Friday in targeted work stoppages at plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. The UAW’s plans for targeted work stoppages would bring only a fraction of the overall workforce off assembly lines. That strategy would help preserve the union’s $825 million fund more than a full strike of all 146,000 workers, but stymie output and disrupt automakers’ production planning. It also could prove risky, because employees who remain on the job likely would be working without a contract, a prospect that has sparked concern among some members.

Related: Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and The Q4 Pothole: Student Loans, Shutdown, and Strikes and EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South

Unions’ declining vote share combined with less dominant Democratic performances with union household voters have made all three Blue Wall states more competitive: after voting reliably Democratic from 1992 to 2012, each narrowly broke for Trump in 2016. Although Biden won all of them back in 2020, he did so by far smaller margins than Obama earned in 2012. In 2020, white, non-college voters constituted a majority of the electorate in Michigan (54%), Pennsylvania (53%), and Wisconsin (58%). While this demographic is still likelier than not to vote Republican, non-college white voters who are unionized were less likely to back Trump in 2020 compared to those who were not. And while these voters are often more culturally moderate or even conservative, many embrace economic populism and highly approve of unions, giving Biden and Democrats an opportunity to make greater inroads.

Related: Flanked by Union Allies, Biden Touts $36 Billion Pension Bailout and The ‘Summer of Strikes’ Isn’t Living Up to the Hype

By 2030 copper and nickel demand could rise by 50-70%, cobalt and neodymium by 150%, and graphite and lithium six- to seven-fold. All told, a carbon-neutral world in 2050 will need 35m tonnes of green metals a year, predicts the International Energy Agency. Industry oracles asked by The Economist predict copper-supply gaps of 2m-4m tonnes, or 6-12% of potential demand, by 2030. They also foresee a shortfall of lithium of 50,000-100,000 tonnes, a 2-4% deficit. Nickel and graphite—plentiful in theory—could cause problems because batteries require pure material. There are too few smelters to refine bauxite into aluminum. Outside China, next to no one produces neodymium.

Related: Glencore Says This Time Is Different for Coming Copper Shortage and Lithium Discovery in US Volcano Could be Biggest Deposit Ever Found and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

Recent studies from the US, Sweden, and Finland all demonstrate that although most people who move directly into new unsubsidised housing may come from the top half of earners, the chain of moves triggered by their purchase frees up housing in the same cities for people on lower incomes.  The US study found that building 100 new market-rate dwellings ultimately leads to up to 70 people moving out of below-median income neighbourhoods, and up to 40 moving out of the poorest fifth. Those numbers don’t budge even if the new housing is priced towards the top end of the market.  It’s a similar story in the American Midwest, where Minneapolis has been building more housing than any other large city in the region for years, and has abolished zones that limited construction to single-family housing. Adjusted for local earnings, average rents in the city are down more than 20% since 2017, while rising in the five other similarly large and growing cities.

Related: On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic

First, we expect the resumption of student loan payments to subtract 0.5pp from quarterly annualized GDP growth. Second, the federal government looks more likely than not to temporarily shut down. A government-wide shutdown would reduce quarterly annualized growth by around 0.2pp for each week it lasted. Third, we estimate that reduced auto production from a potential UAW strike would reduce quarterly annualized growth by 0.05-0.10pp for each week it lasted, if all three companies currently undergoing contract negotiations are impacted. We expect quarterly annualized GDP growth to slow from +3.1% in Q3 to +1.3% in Q4 (vs. consensus of +2.9% and +0.6%). We expect the slowdown to be shallow and short-lived, with GDP growth rebounding to +1.9% in Q1 (vs. consensus of +0.1%) as these temporary drags abate and income growth reaccelerates on the back of continued solid job growth and rising real wages.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise and The Economic Impact of the Student Loan Restart

The impact on markets of the government’s expanded financing need is largely still ahead of us. Over the past year, the government has funded essentially all of the increase in its deficit by issuing T-bills and spending down its cash reserves rather than significantly ramping up the issuance of duration to the market. As a result, Treasury issuance hasn’t needed to entice money out of other cash and asset markets, and thus the impact of the expanded deficit on liquidity has been minimal thus far. We think this pressure is delayed rather than eliminated: looking forward, we expect that the Treasury will shift its mix of issuance toward more duration, as the budget deficit remains elevated and the share of bills outstanding rises through the range that the Treasury generally prefers to target (though there is plenty of flexibility around the precise proportion).

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and DM Debt - How to Move Mountains

The chart shows the % of Black families that are in three income groups, using total money income data. The data is adjusted for inflation. The progress is dramatic. In 1967, the first year available, half of Black families had incomes under $35,000. By 2022 that number had been cut in half to just one quarter of families (the 2022 number is the lowest on record, even beating 2019). Twenty-five percent is still very high, especially when compared to White, Non-Hispanics (it’s about 12 percent), but it’s still massive progress. It’s even a 10-percentage point drop from just 10 years ago. And Black families haven’t just moved up a little bit: the “middle class” group (between $35,000 and $100,000) has been pretty stable in the mid-40 percentages, while the number of rich (over $100,000) Black families has grown dramatically, from just 5% to over 30%.

Related: U.S. Incomes Fall for Third Straight Year and Who Won the Cold War? Part I

Last week Huawei quietly unveiled the Mate 60 Pro—its new smartphone that apparently comes with 5G capabilities. According to a teardown by industry research firm TechInsights, the main chip inside this new phone is made using technology comparable to the so-called 7nm process. It is possibly made by China’s leading chip foundry  Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC).  That is still generations behind the market leaders. For example, TSMC has already been mass-producing more advanced 3nm chips. But that nonetheless is still a big step forward, especially given the limitations China’s chip makers are facing. While SMIC has no access to the most cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, it could use some older equipment to make advanced chips, likely using a process called multipatterning.

Related: China Imports Record Amount of Chipmaking Equipment and Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China

Put simply, Kirin 9000S is a better-designed chip than the West realizes. It has solid power and performance. Even with the lackluster export controls, this is a leading-edge chip that would be near the front of the pack in 2021, yet was done with no access to EUV, no access to cutting-edge US IP, and intentionally hampered. We cannot overstate how scary this is. There are steps that could be taken to ensure that China does not develop the ability to mass-manufacture the sorts of chips needed for high-end military applications in the coming year. Half measures will not work, but a full-scale assault will make it so the cost of replicating the semiconductor supply chain domestically is neigh on impossible. While we aren’t advocating for any of these specifically, it is clear the West can still stop China’s rise if decisive action is taken.

Related: Huawei Building Secret Network for Chips, Trade Group Warns and China Imports Record Amount of Chipmaking Equipment and Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China

We had 2 consecutive unqualifiedly good CPI reports. I was hoping for a 3rd but this one is only qualifiedly good. Not a huge concern but some. I'm focused on core CPI which grew at a 3.4% annual rate after 2 months <2%. Here is swapping new rents instead of all rents for core. The most reassuring of the bunch because new rents are actually falling. Is a useful gut check but I would not actually assume that we're going to see substantial falls in all rents anytime soon. Overall I still feel better than I did a few months ago about the possibility of a soft landing. But I feel a bit worse than I did yesterday. And if you over-updated based on the noisy June and July data you should probably be over-updating back again based on the August data. One month of data will not and should not change what the Fed does next week. But if we get two more months like this then I would hope they hike again at the December meeting.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

Using a debt accounting exercise, we show that periods of sustained debt reduction are typically driven by strong primary balances and above-average growth. Following 1980, inflation has played little role in debt reductions. Current fiscal projections and current market interest rates on average do not point to declines in debt-to-GDP ratios across developed markets. We estimate that market implied r - g, the difference between real interest rates and growth rates, is now positive for many countries. Japan provides an example of high debt peaceably coexisting with low interest rates. However, given current high inflation, wider deficits, and rising interest costs, we think it unlikely that we return to the era of structurally low interest rates in the US, UK, or Europe. As a result, we see the risks to term premia skewed higher as fiscal risks simmer.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and American Gothic and Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?

The decline in marriage and the rise in the share of children being raised in a one-parent home has happened predominantly outside the college-educated class. Over the past 40 years, while college-educated men and women have experienced rising earnings, they continue to get married, often to one another, and to raise their children in a home with married parents. Meanwhile at the same time, the earnings among adults without a college degree have stagnated or risen only a bit. And these groups have become much less likely to marry and more likely to set up households by themselves.So just mechanically, these divergent trends in marriage and family structure mean that household inequality has widened by more than it would have just from the rise in earnings inequality.

Related: US Births Are Down Again, After the COVID Baby Bust and Rebound and Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men and Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?

Americans’ inflation-adjusted median household income fell to $74,580 in 2022, declining 2.3% from the 2021 estimate of $76,330, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The amount has dropped 4.7% since its peak in 2019. Wage growth for the typical worker outstripped inflation starting in December 2022, with inflation-adjusted wages rising about 3% in July, according to data from the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker and the Labor Department.

Related: Jason Furman On Employment Cost Index and Real Wage Growth at the Individual Level in 2022 and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Economy

Brussels will launch an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles that are “distorting” the EU market. The probe could constitute one of the largest trade cases launched as the EU tries to prevent a replay of what happened to its solar industry in the early 2010s when photovoltaic manufacturers undercut by cheap Chinese imports went into insolvency. If found to be in breach of trade rules, manufacturers could be hit with punitive tariffs.

Related: China Set to Overtake Japan as World’s Biggest Car Exporter and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s

The positive-sum vision of global economic integration is that rising production in one place does not need to displace existing production elsewhere because demand and living standards will rise commensurately. Novo Nordisk’s scientists invented something new and valuable, simultaneously creating both supply and demand. They did not pivot from selling to Danes to selling to Americans. The negative-sum vision is the one of businesses burdened by persistent “overcapacity” (really, underconsumption) are forced to fight for market share in a world without growth. The U.S. effectively preempted the influx of Chinese-made electric vehicles with the Inflation Reduction Act, which boosts total demand while reserving a share for local producers. Europe is far more exposed and has yet to formulate a response. The common belief in certain circles that Europeans are more “open to trade” than Americans may not survive this experience.

Related: How Weight Loss Drugs Stopped a Danish Recession and China Set to Overtake Japan as World’s Biggest Car Exporter

By my calculations, if the government could directly or indirectly transfer roughly 1.5% of GDP every year to households, it could drive growth in household income – and with it, household consumption – to around 7% annually. This, in turn, could generate GDP growth of 4-5% even as investment growth dropped sharply. The arithmetic of rebalancing is unassailable. Given its status as the world’s second-largest economy, and by far the world’s largest investor, China simply cannot maintain its current investment share of GDP while continuing to grow relative to the rest of the world.

Related: Can China’s Long-Term Growth Rate Exceed 2–3 Percent? and Chinese Professor Says Youth Jobless Rate Might Have Hit 46.5% and China Cannot Allow Jobless Young To ‘Lie Flat’

For the first time, the new iPhone model you buy on the launch day could be made in India. Apple plans to make the India-built iPhone 15 available in the South Asian country and some other regions on the global sales debut day, people familiar with the matter said. While the vast majority of iPhone 15s will come from China, that would be the first time the latest generation, India-assembled device is available on the first day of sale, they said, asking not to be identified as the matter is private.

Related: Apple India iPhone Output Soars to $7 Billion in China Shift and Top Apple Supplier Foxconn Plans Major India Expansion and Apple’s Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China

The federal budget deficit was $1.5 trillion in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimates—$0.6 trillion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year. Revenues were 10% lower and outlays were 3% higher from October through August than they were during the same period in fiscal year 2022. Receipts collected through August 2023, net of refunds, were about $350 billion less than CBO projected, mainly because of smaller-than-anticipated collections of individual and corporate income taxes.  Net outlays for interest on the public debt rose by $149 billion (or 30 percent), mainly because interest rates are significantly higher than they were in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2022.

Related: The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

While the vast majority of U.S. mortgages are 30 year fixed rate, many other countries rely on either variable rate or short dated fixed rate mortgages. U.S. mortgage debt servicing ratios have thus remained around historical lows due to robust wage growth and a large existing stock of mortgages taken out at low rates. In contrast, households in many other countries are beginning to see their disposable income disappear. The dollar strengthened significantly in 2022 as the Fed moved more aggressively than other major central banks, but sold off when other countries caught up. The scenario may replay in a slightly different way as interest rate differentials widen because other central banks retreat first.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and  The Case for "Higher for Longer": Prices are Disinflating, But Not Wages (Yet)

Using a measure of nonfinancial corporate profits from the national income accounts [before tax profits with capital consumption adjustment] we find that nonfinancial corporate profit margins, or profits over gross value added, increased sharply to about 19% in 2021 Q2 and slipped back to 15% in 2022 Q4, compared to about 13% in 2019 Q4. Our analysis shows that much of the increase in aggregate profit margins following the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to (i) the unprecedented large and direct government intervention to support U.S. small and medium-sized businesses and (ii) a large reduction in net interest expenses due to accommodative monetary policy.  Without the historically outsized government fiscal intervention and accommodative monetary policy, non-financial profit margins during 2020-2021 would have been more in line with past episodes of large economic downturns.

Related: The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins and "Greedflation" and the Profits Equation

China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. Driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world. A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population. The result has been “massive overcapacity” in the number of vehicles produced in factories across the country, said Bill Russo, former head of Chrysler in China and founder of advisory firm Automobility. “We have an overhang of 25mn units not being used.”

Related: China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s and Can Volkswagen Win Back China? and How China Became A Car-Exporting Juggernaut

When the core inflation rate averages above 4%, the stock-bond correlation has been positive with few exceptions. Core inflation has averaged 4.5% for the past three years and is currently 4.7%.  Even in periods of high stock-bond correlations, stocks, and bonds can be negatively correlated over shorter periods. In fact, over the first eight months of this year, stocks and bonds moved opposite one another in May, June, and July. This also helps explain how in the 1970s during a period of sustained positive stock-bond correlations, Treasurys still had positive returns in recessions.  The stock-bond correlation can be seen as an indicator of what is the dominant risk—inflation or growth—and how it is changing.

Related: Stock-Bond Correlations and Do Stocks Always Outperform Bonds?

Mr. Trump’s made huge gains among white voters without a college degree in 2016, a group that was overrepresented in the key Northern battleground states. The polls so far this cycle suggest that the demographic foundations of Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College might be eroding. Mr. Biden is relatively resilient among white voters, who are generally overrepresented in the battleground states. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, shows surprising strength among nonwhite voters, who are generally underrepresented in the most critical battleground states. As a consequence, Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters nationwide would tend to do more to improve his standing in the national vote than in the battleground states. Overall, 83% of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were white in the 2020 election compared with 69% of voters elsewhere in the nation.

Related: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden and How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support and Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs?

Twelve insurers that write homeowners coverage in Louisiana were declared insolvent between July 2021 and February 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Those closures sent insurance prices spiraling out of control, in both absolute terms and also in prices relative to local median incomes that are among the lowest in the nation. The average premium rose 6.7% in 2021 and then 18.5% in 2022, according to the Louisiana Department of Insurance. Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, went from 45,000 policies in 2020 to 130,000 currently. That’s despite the fact that, by law, it charges 10% above market rate and raised rates 65% at the beginning of this year.

Related: Analyzing State Resilience to Weather and Climate Disasters and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters and Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less

The latest government data released just last month points to a second year of increases in 2022 after years of declines. The trend is sparking resentment as house prices in the top 10 rural counties that have seen the biggest population increases surged more than 40% over the past three years. The number of people living in non-metro areas outgrew the urban population for the first time in three decades in 2021, and the rural population expanded again last year. But growth wasn’t evenly distributed, with the top 10 counties with the largest population gains growing by an average 5%, according to Census data. That’s more than the national average of 0.4%.

Related: Young Families Have Not Returned to Large Cities Post-Pandemic and Tax Data Reveals Large Flight of High Earners from Major Cities During the Pandemic

Sweden, which has applied for Nato membership, announced on Monday that it planned to raise defense spending by more than  25%  to meet the military alliance’s target of 2% of GDP.  Currently, only 11 of 31 members do.  Persuading voters of the sacrifices required to make such commitments a reality represents a seismic reordering of the budget and electoral priorities. In Denmark, the government opted to fund its increase in public spending by cancelling a public holiday — to much chagrin from voters. "Leaders have signed up to a generational shift in defence policy. But I do wonder if they fully understand, or have told their finance ministers,” a senior Nato official said.

Related: The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars? and The Cost of the Global Arms Race and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity

The federal deficit for the first 3/4 of the fiscal year 2023 was almost 3x as high as a year before. Very little of it was the result of new spending programs (although money is starting to flow out the door under the Biden administration’s industrial policies).  It was mainly about two things: a sharp fall in tax receipts and rising interest payments. What’s happening on taxes is that the federal government in effect got a windfall from stock prices and inflation, which is now going away. We’re not looking at any fundamental deterioration. The U.S. government really shouldn’t be running budget deficits this big at full employment. Yet we don’t want to reduce deficits by cutting essential spending. America collects a lower share of its income in taxes than other major economies, so more revenue — partly from the rich, but also from the middle class — would be a reasonable policy.

Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and American Gothic and Living with High Public Debt

The hype around the “Magnificent 7” stocks [Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla] that have driven the stock market this year is reminiscent of the dot.com era, which ended with a spectacular crash. However, there are two reasons why today’s developments seem less worrying: The rise of hyped stocks was more extreme in the Dot.com era, as was the rise of the rest of the market. While today’s situation is exceptional, with seven stocks accounting for nearly 30% of the total value of the S&P 500, the rule in the past has been that only a few stocks generated most of the value creation of the stock market in the US and internationally.

Related: 7 or 493 Stocks: What Matters for the S&P 500? and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs

We calculate net global stock market wealth creation of $US 75.7 trillion btw 1990 and 2020.  Wealth creation is highly concentrated. Five firms (0.008% of the total) with the largest wealth creation during the January 1990 to December 2020 period (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tencent) accounted for 10.3% of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 159 firms (0.25% of total) accounted for half of global net wealth creation. The best-performing 1,526 firms (2.39% of the total) can account for all net global wealth creation. Skewness in compound returns is even stronger outside the U.S. The present sample includes 46,723 non-U.S. stocks. Of these, 42.6% generated buy-and-hold returns measured in U.S. dollars that exceed one-month U.S. Treasury bill returns over matched horizons. By comparison, 44.8% of the 17,776 U.S. stocks in the present sample outperformed Treasury bills.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and More Bang for Your Buck and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

Demand for Ozempic (a diabetes drug often sought for weight loss—though not FDA-approved for that purpose) and Wegovy (the new drug explicitly approved for treating obesity), is so strong that it functionally prevented a recession in Denmark—headline GDP is up roughly 1.1% over the last year, but excluding the pharmaceutical industry it’s down -0.9%, meaning drugmakers alone have added roughly 2% to Danish economic growth. Booming exports and high dollar earnings are allowing Danmarks Nationalbank—the Danish Central Bank—to keep rates lower than they otherwise would in order to maintain their currency peg to the Euro. Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant has rapidly become the most valuable publicly traded company in Europe. Sales have risen 30% in the first half of this year, profits are up 40%, and the company is having to ration supply as production struggles to keep up with growth in orders.

Related: More Bang for Your Buck

We built a statistical model to predict the monthly consumer-sentiment index between 1980 and 2016 using a broad battery of economic data. A combination of 13 variables, including inflation, unemployment and petrol prices explained 86% of the variation in the index in this period, a very good fit. Before the pandemic, the relationships between these indicators and consumer sentiment were relatively stable. Although Americans report being worried about their finances, they are behaving as flush as ever—and in economic forecasting, actions speak louder than words. When used to project future spending rather than consumer sentiment, the same battery of economic variables has fully maintained its forecasting power since 2020. In contrast, since covid began, the correlation between sentiment and both current and future spending has vanished.

Note that this is a deceleration of the rate of increase. So if an item had 5% price growth and 1% quantity growth at the end of 2022, and then it had a 3% price growth and 2% quantity growth ending July 2023, it would show up as (-2,+1), or on the bottom right quadrant. It would be categorized as supply-increasing in this exercise, as the rate of price increases fell while the rate of quantity increases picked up. At the moment, the inflation story is exactly what a “soft landing” would have predicted. A combination of resolving supply shocks and a subtle decrease in demand has driven inflation down dramatically, with no cost to the level of employment.

Related: The Relationship between Consumption Growth and Inflation and What We’ve Learned About Inflation and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world.  Thomas Benson, a geologist at Lithium Americas Corporation expects to begin mining in 2026. It will remove clay with water and then separate out the small lithium-bearing grains from larger minerals by centrifuging. The clay will then be leached in vats of sulfuric acid to extract lithium.

Related: Tesla’s Lithium Lead at Risk as Rivals Make Supply Deals and Chile’s Move to Control Lithium Alarms Industry and China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s

Vietnam has upgraded its relationship with the US to the highest level.  The US signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with the south-east Asian country on Sunday after President Joe Biden arrived in Hanoi from New Delhi, where he had attended the G20 summit. The symbolic but significant change, which follows years of lobbying by Washington, raises the US by two levels to the top status in Vietnam’s bilateral ties hierarchy. The status is one previously reserved only for China, Russia, India and, as of last year, South Korea. Vietnam had long avoided the move for fear of upsetting Beijing. As well as having security implications, such as potential defence co-operation, the new US status also carries economic importance, especially in crucial industries such as semiconductors.

Related: Vietnam Boots UK Out of Top Seven US Trading Partners and War, AI and Climate Change Shake Up $32 Trillion in Global Trade and Globalization Isn’t Dead. But It’s Changing

During a meeting on Saturday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in India, Giorgia Meloni told Chinese Premier Li Qiang that Italy plans to withdraw from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative while still looking to maintain friendly relations with Beijing, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named. Italy officially signed up for the pact in 2019.

Related: Italy Intends to Exit China Belt and Road Pact as Relations Sour and China As an International Lender of Last Resort

Nationally, the real cost of [weather and climate]  disasters has risen from $20B per year in the 1980s to nearly $95B per year during the period 2010–19. In 2021, damages increased to about $153B. Costs were absorbed by four entities: property insurers (48%), uninsured or underinsured homeowners, businesses, and agricultural entities (37%), the federal government (11%), and state and local governments (4%). If property insurers were to exit certain markets or decrease coverage in states with greater exposure to physical risks due to decreased profitability, a larger share of damages would not be fully insured. Two major insurers recently announced that they will no longer accept new applications for business and personal property insurance coverage in California, citing increasing wildfire risk as a key factor in that decision. In addition, several major hurricanes during 2020-22 forced numerous insurance companies into bankruptcy in Louisiana and Florida.

Related: Home Insurers Are Charging More and Insuring Less and Why California and Florida Have Become Almost Uninsurable and How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters

While the global economy keeps growing over time, the NZE Ambition [net zero emissions] scenario results in a slowdown of GDP growth, both between 2019 and 2030 and between 2030 and 2050. The average global GDP growth rate goes from 2.3% per annum in the Baseline between 2019 and 2030 to 2.0% and decreases from 2.1% between 2030 and 2050 in the Baseline scenario to 1.9% in the NZE Ambition scenario. This leads to a reduction of global GDP compared to Baseline by 2.6% in 2030 and 5.6% in 2050.

Related: Growing Pains: The Renewable Transition in Adolescence and What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate?

High interest rates have prompted homeowners to stay put rather than buy new homes and take on more expensive mortgages, resulting in an unusually low inventory of homes for sale. Sales of previously owned homes are now down about 36% from January 2022. But prices are generally holding firm outside of a few trouble spots.

Related: The "New Normal" Mortgage Rate Range and The Great Pandemic Mortgage Refinance Boom and Have Rising Mortgage Rates Frozen the Housing Market?

Looking back over the last few decades, there’s a clear relationship between the racial turnout gap — the difference between white and Black turnout — and the proportion of Black registered voters who back Democrats in pre-election polls since 1980. Or put differently: When Black voters don’t support Democrats, they tend not to vote. It’s possible that the Black voters who back Mr. Trump in the polls today will ultimately show up for him next November. But for now, when I see Mr. Biden’s share among Black voters slip into the 60s and 70s in the polls, I mostly see yet another decline in the Black share of the electorate, at least “if the election were held today.” If there’s any good news for Mr. Biden here, it’s that the election is still 14 months away.

Related: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden

Defense Chief General Anil Chauhan — India’s top military commander — commissioned a study to examine the wider impact of any war over the island that also involves the US and its allies, and what action India could take in response.  One option the Indian military will study involves serving as a logistics hub to provide repair and maintenance facilities for allied warships and aircraft, as well as food, fuel and medical equipment for armies resisting China.  A more extreme scenario would assess the potential for India to get directly involved along their northern border, opening a new theater of war for China. While no deadline has been set to complete the study, the Indian military is under orders to finish it as soon as possible, one of the officials said.

Related: US and India Announce Defence and Technology Deals During Visit By Narendra Modi and Indian Stock Market Surges as Foreign Funds Buy Into National Growth Story and India Equity: An Unsung Long-Term Performance Story

It is unclear whether the normalization of churn that has already occurred will be sufficient to bring wage growth—and therefore consumer spending power—back in line with what would be consistent with the Fed’s inflation target. My preferred high-frequency measure of underlying wage growth has been the three-month average of the monthly change in average hourly pay for nonsupervisory workers outside of the retail, leisure, and hospitality industries. After hovering around 5% since last summer, it has come down sharply in the past three months to just 4% in June-August. That is encouraging news and seems to fit with the recent moves in the quit rate and the job openings rate.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and Rate Cuts and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market

During the past 20 years, the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage of non-management US workers, also known as production and nonsupervisory employees, has risen 13%. That’s not exactly a rip-roaring pace — 0.6% a year. Then again, real hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees fell in the 1970s and 1980s and rose at only a 0.3% annual pace in the 1990s. The average hourly wage for autoworkers on the production line has dropped 30% since 2003. GM, Ford and Stellantis are all profitable, with a combined net income of $42B for the 12 months ended in June and the amount coming from their US operations probably adding up to somewhat less than $30B. Bloomberg reported last month that Ford and GM’s internal estimates of the costs of the UAW’s demands peg them at $80B per company over the next four years, which would wipe out all those profits and then some.

Related: EV Boom Remakes Rural Towns in the American South and Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers

The nominal yield spread is currently negative—quite low by historical standards—and predicts a 65% probability of recession in 12 months. This recession probability would be unprecedentedly high for a false positive. The “real” interest rate spread implies a still elevated, but lower probability of recession in 12 months, of about 40%. This 40% probability is the highest in the history of the series, exceeding that even in any actual recession. Even if a model were literally correct instead of an approximation, these models predict 40%, 50%, and 60% probabilities of recessions, which means there is a fair likelihood of a soft landing.

Related: Soft Landing Summer and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is broad, spanning virtually every demographic category and racial group, including a 72-11 lead among Black voters and a 47-35 lead among Hispanic registrants. The sample of Asian voters is not large enough to report, though nonwhite voters who aren’t Black or Hispanic — whether Asian, Native American, multiracial or something else — back Mr. Biden by just 40-39. In all three cases, Mr. Biden’s tallies are well beneath his standing in the last election. The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5% of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8% of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020.

Related: Can Democrats Survive the Looming Crisis in New York City’s Outer Boroughs? and The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory and Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024

The Pentagon intends to field a vast network of AI-powered technology, drones and autonomous systems within the next two years to counter threats from China and other adversaries. Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, provided new details in a speech Wednesday about the department’s plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to produce an array of thousands of air-, land- and sea-based artificial-intelligence systems that are intended to be “small, smart, cheap.”

Related: U.S. Weapons Industry Unprepared for a China Conflict, Report Says and Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

Unexpected changes in monetary policy can slow the pace of economic activity much more persistently than is commonly believed.  In response to a 1% increase in interest rates, output would be about 5% lower after 12 years than it would otherwise be. To provide some context for these numbers, consider some data for the United States. In response to a similar 1% increase in interest rates, after 12 years TFP would be about 3% lower and capital would be about 4% lower. When we separate our interest rate experiments into those that resulted in rate hikes versus those that resulted in lower interest rates, we see that there is no free lunch. The blue line shows that lower interest rates have mostly temporary effects that vanish after a few years, as traditional theories predict.

Related: Loose Monetary Policy and Financial Instability and Monetary Policy and Innovation

Spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade. The trend can be a little hard to see because, as baby boomers have aged, the number of people using Medicare has grown. The reason for the per-person slowdown is a bit of a mystery. Some of the reductions are easy to explain. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011. But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.

Related: America’s Entitlement Programmes Are Rapidly Approaching Insolvency and Why Medicare and Social Security Are Sustainable and Interest Costs Will Grow the Fastest Over the Next 30 Years

The continued positive inflation and labor market news has led us to cut our estimated 12-month US recession probability further to 15%, down 5pp from our prior estimate and equal to the unconditional average recession probability of 15% calculated from the fact that a recession has occurred roughly once every seven years since WW2. Our estimate is far below the Bloomberg consensus, which remains stuck at 60%. Our expectation is that the 1991-2007 period, when the nominal funds rate fluctuated between 1% and 6½%, will prove to be a better template than the post-2008 period when the Fed found it difficult to get much above 2%.

Related: What Have We Learned About the Neutral Rate? and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider

One source of upward pressure on US rates is the $7.6 trillion in US government bonds that will mature over the coming 12 months.

Related: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible? and Rising Rates Slowing Growth Through Higher Debt Servicing Costs and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Indirect lending—along with foreclosed properties, trading portfolios and other assets linked to commercial properties—brings banks’ total exposure to commercial real estate to $3.6 trillion, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That’s equivalent to about 20% of their deposits. Holdings of CMBS and loans to mortgage REITs and other nonbank lenders accounted for about 18% of the nearly $3.6 trillion in commercial real-estate exposure in 2022, or nearly $623 billion. The first quarter of 2023 marked the first decline in banks’ commercial real-estate holdings since 2013. At that point, banks’ overall securities holdings had lost nearly $400 billion in value, largely due to higher interest rates. Banks don’t have to mark down the value of loans in most cases, so the real losses are likely greater. The banks are in danger of setting off a doom-loop scenario where losses on the loans trigger banks to cut lending, which leads to further drops in property prices and yet more losses.

Related: Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse and Who’s Afraid of Commercial Real Estate? and Rates Are Up. We’re Just Starting to Feel the Heat

Central business districts (CBDs) in the northern and western US continue to see consumer spending below pre-pandemic levels. However, there is a glimmer in New York City and Seattle that the situation is not continuing to deteriorate. Cities in the south are seeing strong growth in their city centers.  The difference in performance is largely driven by migration patterns as working from home doesn't necessarily vary across cities. For example, southern cities with increased population growth also seem to be capturing more of the increasing spend in their city centers.  Cities with population gains %YoY as of 2Q 2023 (Tampa, Phoenix, Orlando, Nashville, Jacksonville, Columbus, Charlotte and Austin) are seeing spending relative to pre-pandemic up around 20%. On the other hand, cities with net population losses over this period (New York, Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta) have spending down around 20%.

Related: On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and Remote Work, Three Years Later and A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget the federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s spending imbalance despite robust overall economic growth. After the government’s record spending in 2020 and 2021 to combat the impact of covid-19, the deficit dropped by the greatest amount ever in 2022, falling from close to $3 trillion to roughly $1 trillion. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit then shot upward. Budget experts now project that it will probably rise to about $2 trillion for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Jason Furman said the current jump in the deficit is only surpassed by “major crises,” such as World War II, the 2008 financial meltdown or the coronavirus pandemic.

Related: Living with High Public Debt and There Is No "Stealth Fiscal Stimulus" and US Fiscal Alarm Bells Are Drowning Out a Deeper Problem

Growth theory reveals that in the long run, growth in living standards is determined by growth in the worldwide number of people searching for ideas. A growth accounting exercise for the US since the 1950s suggests that many other factors have temporarily contributed to growth, including rising educational attainment and a rising investment rate in ideas. But these forces are inherently temporary, implying that growth rates could slow in the future. In contrast, other forces could potentially sustain or even increase growth rates. The emergence of countries such as China and India provides large numbers of people who could search for ideas. Improvements in the allocation of talent — for example, the rise of women inventors — and increased automation through artificial intelligence are other potential tailwinds.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and From Strength To Strength and Fully Grown - European Vacation!

Bloomberg Economics now sees growth in China’s economy — the world’s second largest — slowing to 3.5% in 2030 and to near 1% by 2050. That’s lower than prior projections of 4.3% and 1.6%, respectively. It will take until the mid-2040s for China’s GDP to exceed that of the US — and even then, it will happen by “only a small margin” before “falling back behind.” Before the pandemic, Bloomberg expected China to take and hold pole position as early as the start of next decade. Bloomberg estimates potential US growth at 1.7% in 2022-2023, with long-term forecasts showing a gradual drifting down to 1.5% by 2050.

Related: When Will China’s GDP Overtake America’s? and How Soon and At What Height Will China’s Economy Peak? and The Neoclassical Growth of China

We expect real income will grow by 3% in 2024 on a Q4/Q4 basis. In terms of components, expected labor income gains account for over half this increase, we expect interest income increases will raise real income growth by over 1pp, and the pullback in Medicaid coverage [Sunset of pandemic era continuous enrollment provision] is set to subtract almost ½pp. This pace of real income growth is below the 4% pace in 2023, but comfortably above the roughly 2½% real growth pace observed in the 20 years prior to the pandemic. In terms of the timing of these real income gains, we forecast a flatter profile than in 2023, as start-of-year adjustments from COLAs and changes in the effective tax rate will likely be less of a driver of income growth in 2024.

Related: Soft Landing Optimism Is Everywhere. That’s Happened Before and Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes

We’ve found reasons to think more highly of Europe and Japan. Notably, we find that value stocks in Europe and Japan are more profitable, with Europe being particularly impressive. Among firms that trade at a discount to book value, Europe has a Gross Profit/Assets ratio of 18.5%, which is 1.5x the profitability of North American value firms. The differences are even more stark in terms of EBITDA/Assets, with Europe’s value firms delivering a 6.4% return on assets, almost 3x higher than North America’s profitability among value firms. We believe that the combination of historically wide valuation spreads in Europe and higher levels of profitability among Europe’s value stocks bolster the case for upward mean reversion going forward. Historically, mean reversion in multiples has supported significant outperformance of value relative to growth.

Related: Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ and From Strength To Strength and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies

While bank lending plateaued in the U.S., off-shore dollar bank lending has actually contracted outright at a rate not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. Data as of 2023Q1 indicates a year over year decline of $325b in loans with the bulk of the decline concentrated in lending to emerging markets. This is likely due to both supply and demand factors, where borrowers pull back due to higher rates and banks reduce lending due to lower profitability. A similar trend is observed on-shore, where bank lending has been growing at a very sluggish rate. Note that foreign banks may not have access to dollar liquidity backstops like FHLB lending and the discount window, so they may be more cautious than U.S. banks. The reduction in dollar credit is likely contributing to the global manufacturing slump and will remain a significant headwind to global growth.

Related: BIS International Banking Statistics and Global Liquidity Indicators at End December 2022

The big way I think China could negatively impact the U.S. economy is that if China decides to export its way out, the U.S. is still the biggest market for consumer goods and the biggest market for imported goods globally. If China really wanted to export its way out, let its currency go, there would be a big further depreciation in the Yuan. And the Yuan’s already a 15-year low, more or less. If the Yuan goes back to the levels where it was when China joined the WTO, without an enormous ratcheting up of trade restrictions, there would be pressure on certain parts of the U.S. economy that I think would be meaningful. There’s no doubt that China has the biggest manufacturing base in the world. And those parts of the U.S. economy that compete with it may face difficulty if China can’t find a way to recover other than exports.

Related: Setser On China's Trade Surplus and Brad Setser On Deglobalization and Is the Chinese Government Pushing Down the Yuan?

Even after a planned rise in October, the minimum wage in Tokyo will be the equivalent of just $7.65, compared with $15 in New York City. Median household income in Japan in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, was equivalent to about $29,000 at the current exchange rate, compared with $70,784 in the U.S. that year, according to government statistics in the two countries. The typical Asian-American household brought in just over $100,000—more than triple what the typical Japanese family made.

Related: The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies and Japan Demographic Woes Deepen as Birthrate Hits Record Low and From Strength To Strength

The 2024-25 budget represents a 13% rise compared with this fiscal year’s intended spending. It is part of a five-year, ¥43tn plan by Tokyo to strengthen its defence capabilities and bring military spending to roughly 2% of current gross domestic product, compared with the self-imposed cap of about 1% of GDP that Japan has maintained since the 1960s. Japan intends to build destroyers equipped with a US-built Aegis missile defence. The planned shopping list also includes the acquisition of counterstrike weapons, including Tomahawk cruise missiles. The largest portion of the requested spending will be designated to strengthening the “sustainability and resilience” of the Self-Defense Forces. The aim is to address shortages of basic items that officials fear will hamper the SDF’s ability to cope with a prolonged conflict.

Related: The Age-Old Question: How Do Governments Pay For Wars? and The Cost of the Global Arms Race and US To Link Up With Taiwan and Japan Drone Fleets To Share Real-Time Data

Overall both household and payroll employment are 1.5mm higher than CBO's pre-pandemic projections. It doesn't feel that long ago that people were talking about missing workers (talking about it for longer than was justified by the data I might add). Pretty much the only thing that went in the direction of tighter was average weekly hours ticked up but this series is noisy because of rounding and measurement issues. As a result, aggregate hours grew strongly as well. Average hourly earnings growth was the slowest in over a year and a half. This is noisy, subject to revision, but even adjusting for that perhaps the biggest sign of cooling in this report.

Related: Has the Fed Tightened Enough? Guideposts to Consider and  Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and Unions’ Inflation Warning?

[Short-term interest rates] are not “market-determined” in any normal sense, but chosen at the discretion of the ~18 members of the FOMC. Longer-term interest rates are not explicitly set by the Fed, but Fed officials try to make those rates go up or down when they think it is necessary to achieve their policy objectives, sometimes by buying or selling bonds outright. If the point of maintaining “market functioning” is to prevent spikes in yields that could hurt borrowers in the real economy while facilitating transactions of bonds for cash, central banks are already better-positioned to do those trades directly than anyone else. What would be the point of involving intermediaries, except to pay them for a service that could be provided in-house? This is effectively what the BOJ has been doing for years, laying out target ranges for yields at points on the curve, adjusting those ranges as needed, sometimes buying oodles of Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs), and often doing nothing.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Living with High Public Debt and The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates

Hedge fund short futures positions in the 2-year, 5-year, and 10-year contracts rose by $411 billion between October 4th, 2022 and May 9th, 2023. Consistent with these empirical trends, spreads on the trade suggest it has been profitable at several points in recent months, without considering the value of options embedded in the trade (and whose value has likely increased as measures of Treasury market uncertainty have risen). The cash-futures basis trade is an arbitrage trade that involves a short Treasury futures position, a long Treasury cash position, and borrowing in the repo market to finance the trade and provide leverage. This trade presents a financial stability vulnerability because the trade is generally highly leveraged and is exposed to both changes in futures margins and changes in repo spreads. Hedge funds unwinding the cash-futures basis trade likely contributed to the March 2020 Treasury market instability.

Related: Resilience Redux in the US Treasury Market and Who Has Been Buying U.S. Treasury Debt? and A Beautiful Replenishment

Most Americans still overwhelmingly stick to an ideal of two to three children. In fact, the share of people saying they want three or more children has risen as the actual number of children being born has dropped. By the mid-1990s, about one-third of Americans said the ideal family had three or more children. But since then, the share of respondents citing an ideal of three or more children has gradually climbed. Despite dipping briefly after the pandemic, that group rebounded again in 2022 to 44%, according to the General Social Survey, the more than 50-year-old survey of Americans’ social views conducted by the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, the share of people who say the ideal family consists of two children slipped to 51.7% in 2022 from 62% in 1998. On average, the ideal family is 2.5 children, which is up slightly from the 1990s but relatively little changed over the course of 50 years.

Related: Young Adults in the U.S. Are Reaching Key Life Milestones Later Than in the Past and Immigrants & Their Kids Were 70% of U.S. Labor Force Growth Since 1995

U.S. companies have $600 billion in corporate debt set to mature this year, a total that will grow to more than $1 trillion a year from 2025 until 2028. That stark data from Goldman Sachs points to a financial cliff that is coming for American corporations, which executives are trying to navigate by extending the dates their debts come due, refinancing borrowings or managing cash reserves. What’s at stake? The debt loads, coupled with the rising costs of new financing for companies, may cut into corporate profits, investor returns, spending on new ideas, hiring—and could lead to less-healthy balance sheets. Some analysts say there could be a swath of corporate credit-rating downgrades ahead.

Related: How Is the Corporate Bond Market Functioning as Interest Rates Increase? and Credit Normalization and A Default Cycle Has Started

There has been no major increase in the US capital-output ratio, nor has there been a major decline in the US marginal product of capital – the economy’s real return to capital. The US capital-output ratio remains close to its postwar average and capital’s real return has remained roughly constant -- around 6%.  During the 2000s the marginal product of U.S. capital (MPK) was a healthy 5.84%.  In the 2010s it was even higher at 6.42%.  The market return to capital would show a decline if there were a capital glut and investors expected lower rates of return, It shows no such decline. The market return to capital’s real return averaged 5.52% between 1950 and 1989. Btw 1990 and 2019 it averaged 6.95. Hence, the broadest market-based real return data shows a rise, not a fall in returns in the recent decades during which capital has allegedly been in vast oversupply. The real return to US wealth between 2010 and 2019 averaged 8.25% – the highest average return of any postwar decade.

Related: In Search of Safe Havens: The Trust Deficit and Risk-free Investments! and Summers and Blanchard Debate the Future of Interest Rates

Since February 2023, the labor force participation rate for prime-age women––those between the ages of 25 and 54––has exceeded its all-time high. As of the most recent jobs report, prime-age women had a labor force participation rate of 77.8%. We find that those who have contributed most to the rebound in overall labor force participation in April and May of 2023, three years after the nadir of pandemic-era participation, are in fact prime-age women. Moreover, among prime-age women and indeed among all groups, women whose youngest child is under the age of five are powering the pack’s upward trajectory.

Related: “The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation and The Labor Supply Rebound from the Pandemic and Retirements, Net Worth, and the Fall and Rise of Labor Force Participation

Auto companies have announced more than $110 billion in EV-related investments in the U.S. since 2018, with about half that sum destined for Southern states, according to the Center for Automotive Research. The rest is mostly planned for states in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Auto employment in the Great Lakes region, while still nearly double that of southern states, has slid 34% in the last two decades to 382,000 workers as of 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Full-time unionized jobs in the industry currently range between $18 to $32 an hour. There is no guarantee the [southern] Ford plants will be unionized, and the company has said this decision is up to its workers. The United Auto Workers union is currently in talks with the Detroit automakers and is prioritizing organizing these joint-venture battery plants.

Related: Auto Union Boss Wants 46% Raise, 32-Hour Work Week in ‘War’ Against Detroit Carmakers and Republican Districts Dominate US Clean Technology Investment Boom and Small Towns Chase America’s $3 Trillion Climate Gold Rush

South Korea’s fertility rate slumped to 0.78 last year, from 0.81 in 2021. The slide has worsened in recent months, falling to 0.70 in the April-to-June quarter. Since 2013, the country of 52 million has reported the lowest fertility rate among wealthy members of the OECD—where the average fertility rate stands at 1.58. No other OECD member has a fertility rate below 1. South Korea’s population began declining in 2020, with the number of deaths overtaking total births. Its military conscripts are expected to shrink by nearly half over the next two decades. The military has started to deploy more unmanned combat aircraft and increase the number of women serving. The country’s total student enrollment has shrunk for 18 years straight.

Related: South Korea Again Smashes Own Record for World’s Lowest Fertility Rate in 2022 and The Great Global Baby Bust is Under Way and How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World

A 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” documents the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years.  The total number of individual donors grew from 5.2mm in 2006 to 195mm in 2020.  The appeal of extreme candidates can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle: Bernie Sanders raised $38.3mm, of which 70%, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12.5mm, of which 68% came from small donors; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12.3mm, of which 68%, came from small donors. House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.

Related: Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal? and What Happened In 2022 and Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage

Rather than signaling a trend towards deglobalization, the available data hints at a looming “great reallocation” of US supply chain activity. This shift is marked by a decline in direct US sourcing from China, with a corresponding rise in import share from low-wage locations, chiefly Vietnam, and regional trade areas, particularly Mexico.  Recent policy efforts may ultimately not succeed in their objective to reduce US dependence on supply chains tied to China. Despite a decrease in US direct reliance on China, there has been an increase in China’s import share in “friendly” nations, including the EU, Mexico, and Vietnam. Chinese firms are stepping up FDI and production facilities in Vietnam and Mexico in critical sectors, albeit from a low base. This suggests that plants in which China is the ultimate owner may continue to play a significant role in US value chains.

Related: How America Is Failing To Break Up With China and Setser On Rumors Of Decoupling and Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives to Chinese Manufacturing

Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund. China was for years a major driver of Germany’s export boom. A rapidly industrializing China bought up all the capital goods that Germany could make. But China’s investment-heavy growth model has been approaching its limits for years. Growth and demand for imports have faltered. Energy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.

Related: Germany's Industrial Slowdown and Europe's Imbalances in Pandemic and War and Can Volkswagen Win Back China?

In this analysis, I look at the performance of stocks referred to by some as the “Magnificent Seven” (Mag7). These are: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.   The combined market value of all 500 stocks in the S&P 500 has increased by $5 trillion or 15.3% in 2023, as mentioned. Leaving Mag7 out of the equation, the value of the remaining 493 shares has risen from $26 trillion to $27 trillion today, a return of only 4.5%. Consequently, Mag7 stocks have provided a 10.8% increase in the S&P 500. This means that only 7 out of 500 stocks generated 10.8%/15.3% = 71% of the return of the S&P 500 in 2023. The remaining 493 stocks delivered the remaining 29%. One can only speculate whether these shares are bubbles. The spectacular performance of Nvidia, for example, is reminiscent of the performance of hyped stocks during the dot.com bubble at the turn of the millennium.

Related: Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and Long Term Expectations and Aggregate Fluctuations

Work from home has reduced office utilization rates but has not yet led to substantial declines in office occupancy rates because most firms are locked in long-duration leases. Going forward, 17% of all office leases are scheduled to expire by the end of 2024, 47% between 2024-2029, and the rest after 2030. Our baseline estimates suggest that remote work will likely exert 0.8pp of upward pressure on the office vacancy rate by 2024, an additional 2.3pp over 2025-2029, and another 1.8pp in 2030 and beyond, though this is likely to be partially offset by a decline in new construction. The share of employees working remotely remains remarkably elevated in industries like information that require less face-to-face interaction, while it is much lower in contact-heavy sectors like retail and hospitality.

Related: Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse

A wealth of underground water helped create America, its vast cities and bountiful farmland. Now, Americans are squandering that inheritance. The Times analyzed water levels reported at tens of thousands of sites, revealing a crisis that threatens American prosperity - 84,544 monitoring wells examined for trends since 1920. Nearly half the sites have declined significantly over the past 40 years as more water has been pumped out than nature can replenish. In the past decade, four of every 10 sites hit all-time lows. And last year was the worst yet.

Related: Arizona Is Running Out of Cheap Water. Investors Saw It Coming and A Breakthrough Deal to Keep the Colorado River from Going Dry, for Now and Texas Farmers Are Worried One of the State’s Most Precious Water Resources is Running Dry. You Should Be Too

The sea surface temperatures of the gulf have cooked, warming more than 3 degrees above the norm for the date. The water has also heated up far beneath the surface. In fact, temperatures of nearly 88° are common to depths of 165 feet below the surface, according to data from Kim Wood, a professor of meteorology at Mississippi State University. University of Miami hurricane scientist Andy Hazelton called the ocean heat “other-worldly.” While the Gulf of Mexico as a whole has cooled slightly compared with earlier this month, when it shattered records, it remains near all-time highs.

Related: Heating Waters Force Change in Industries That Depend on the Ocean and What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet and The Rapid Loss Of Antarctic Sea Ice Brings Grim Scenarios Into View

Models of artificial intelligence (AI) that have billions of parameters can achieve high accuracy across a range of tasks but they exacerbate the poor energy efficiency of conventional general-purpose processors, such as graphics processing units or central processing units. Analog in-memory computing (analog-AI) can provide better energy efficiency by performing matrix–vector multiplications in parallel on ‘memory tiles’. However, analog-AI has yet to demonstrate software-equivalent (SWeq) accuracy on models that require many such tiles and efficient communication of neural-network activations between the tiles. We demonstrate fully end-to-end SWeq accuracy for a small keyword-spotting network and near-SWeq accuracy on the much larger MLPerf8 recurrent neural-network transducer (RNNT.)

Related: Mega Firms and Recent Trends in the U.S. Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent Data and The Race of the AI Labs Heats Up and The Dream of Bringing Back Bell Labs

The total amount of Treasuries outstanding will continue to grow rapidly relative to the intermediation capacity of the market because of large and persistent US fiscal deficits and the limited flexibility of dealer balance sheets, unless there are significant improvements in market structure. Broad central clearing and all-to-all trade have the potential to add importantly to market capacity and resilience. Additional improvements in intermediation capacity can likely be achieved with real-time post-trade transaction reporting and improvements in the form of capital regulation, especially the Supplementary Leverage Ratio. Backstopping the liquidity of this market with transparent official-sector purchase programs will further buttress market resilience.

Related: JPMorgan Says Treasuries Coping Amid Worst Liquidity Since 2020 and Raising Anchor

Today, about 2.5% wage growth would be consistent with 2% inflation, as recent-trend productivity growth has been low and other sources of income (from assets and government-deficit-financed transfers) are more neutral. With wage growth currently running at around 4.5%, we’re far away from this level. We’re more likely to see inflation level out at its current rate rather than continue to decline like it has over the past year. This would push the Fed to continue tightening and, with a short pause and return toward easing being priced in, could come through the form of either rate rises or holding rates at high levels. This makes assets especially vulnerable to another round of tighter policy.

Related: The Unresolved Tension Between Prices and Incomes and The Tightening Cycle Is Approaching Stage 3: Guideposts We’re Watching and Rate Cuts