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April 22, 2025
In full swing: What baseball and housing have in common
Baseball and the housing market have a couple of things in common. Both reach peak activity in the spring and both are tracked using a plethora of statistics. The granular details of RBIs, home runs, and at-bats are known to every diehard baseball fan. Housing’s copious data—sales both new and existing, starts, permits, and mortgage rates—make it the statistical envy of other sectors.
And just as a baseball team’s stats can foreshadow its win/loss record, housing stats tend to be a leading indicator of a market’s overall economic performance.
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June 14, 2021
MainStreet Macro: Should MainStreet Care about Student Debt?
This month, students around the country will graduate from college, vocational schools, and high school after a year of learning like no other. Well it’s almost like no other. One constant of higher education before and after the pandemic has been its high price tag. U.S. students owe a whopping $1.7 trillion in combined debt. Outstanding student loans have skyrocketed 90% over the past decade. Should Main Street care about student debt?
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June 7, 2021
MainStreet Macro: Where are the workers?
by Nela Richardson, Ph.D.
Last week, the May jobs report captured the attention of economists, policymakers, Wall Street and Main Street. We know where the jobs are. This week, we answer the other question that has plagued us this year – where are all the workers?
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June 1, 2021
MainStreet Macro: The Economy Needs a Vacation–Yours
Memorial Day weekend – the unofficial kickoff to summer. If you’re like me, yours looks like a combination of work and play.
But this year, many Americans have had to postpone their usual summer planning. And many others are preparing to make do with less as states begin to revoke a federal unemployment benefit. On this weeks blog, we look at three ways of looking at this summer's labor outlook.
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May 24, 2021
MainStreet Macro: The Retail Remix
Last week we explained how to understand the economy in five easy steps. This week we focus on the most important indicator to watch – consumer spending. The great reopening has many of us dusting off our credit cards to shop (I’ll be honest, I never stopped). Yet the retail landscape is being transformed. Trends in place before COVID-19 accelerated during the pandemic and are remixing retail into the future.
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May 17, 2021
MainStreet Macro: How are we doing? Unpacking the economy in five easy steps
Fourteen months after the pandemic’s initial assault, Main Streeters want to know how we’re doing.
The answer isn’t simple. There’s a deluge of data, but depending on where you look, you could find different answers.
So how are we doing – really? Here are five things to watch to get a sense of the economy’s overall well-being, ranked from important to very important.
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May 10, 2021
MainStreet Macro: Job Switching
Typically, when the economic growth starts to accelerate like it is now, workers dust off their resumes and look for better options. The economy grew a vigorous 6.4% annualized in the first three months of the year, and is poised to grow by double digits in the current quarter. Yet recent data shows that even as the economy has improved, employees are reluctant to seek out new opportunities. In this week’s blog, we discuss the analysis conducted on 18 million workers to measure the financial returns to job switching.
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May 3, 2021
MainStreet Macro: The Global Workforce Speaks
We’ve spent much of MainStreet Macro’s first four months tracking the economic recovery and unprecedented changes in employment due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This week, we shift gears to hear from workers themselves about how their attitudes and lives have adjusted.
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April 26, 2021
MainStreet Macro: Three lessons from history
This is a busy week for the economy. Not only are key members of the Federal Reserve meeting to discuss the hot topic of inflation, we’ll also get a report card on economic growth in the first quarter. What happens next for the economy is uncharted. We’ve never seen such a collision of low interest rates, massive fiscal stimulus, easy money and wealth disparity. We don’t know if the vigorous pace of growth will continue in the second half of the year, or even whether all sectors can recover if it does.
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