FEATURED POST
March 18, 2025
What’s slowing the inflation slowdown?
Good news! Inflation is slowing. The annualized pace of consumer inflation fell to 2.8 percent in February from 3 percent in January. For businesses, price growth was 3.2 percent, down from 3.7 percent. We’re getting closer to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate of inflation. But there’s another 2 percent touchstone that matters even more for inflation in the long term—productivity growth.
Read more
Subscribe to Data Lab
Stay up-to-date on the latest reports and trends.
Stay up to date with Data Lab
Please complete all fields.
Filter by:
July 29, 2024
Main Street Macro: Watching for signs of a rate cut? Keep an eye on these data sets
Sometimes the numbers speak for themselves. And for a data-driven Federal Reserve, this week’s cacophony of labor market releases will help shape the timing and duration of future rate cuts.
As such, economists and market watchers will be paying close attention to nonfarm payrolls, the unemployment rate, and average hourly earnings when they’re released Friday. But there’s much more to this job market than these headline releases. To know what’s really going on in hiring, here are three other data sets worth watching.
Read more
July 22, 2024
Main Street Macro: The next Fed rate cut might disappoint. Here’s why.
The recent slowdown in inflation has left market watchers more confident that Federal Reserve policymakers will cut interest rates at least once this year. What’s harder to predict is how those rate cuts might affect the economy.
Read more
July 15, 2024
Main Street Macro: The self-love theory of economics
As we enter the third week of July, upcoming data releases are all about economic incentives. While insights about supply, demand, and equilibrium often make the headlines, a crucial but rarely discussed pillar of economics is the importance of incentives to macroeconomic outcomes.
Read more
July 8, 2024
Main Street Macro: Wages and hiring: It’s not as simple as you think
Last week’s run of jobs data made two things clear. The U.S. job market is cooling, and hiring is highly concentrated in just a few service sectors. Both these trends could have implications for wages, which could, in turn, have implications for the Federal Reserve.
Read more
July 1, 2024
Main Street Macro: Three job questions for the next six months
Over the past six months, the job market has proven to be the most consistently upbeat indicator of the U.S. economy. Hiring didn't surge like the U.S. deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will increase by more than $400 billion to $1.9 trillion this year, the third-largest deficit on record, behind 2020 and 2021, when pandemic relief spending pushed it to a record high.
Read more
June 24, 2024
Main Street Macro: People are buying less stuff. That might matter for inflation.
Over the last four years, Main Street’s elevated consumption of durable goods has had both plusses and minuses for the economy. On the plus side, consumer spending on items such as electronics, refrigerators, and new cars helped pull the U.S. economy from the depths of the pandemic downturn into three years of robust growth.
Read more
June 17, 2024
Main Street Macro: Jobs aren’t everything
By several measures, the job market is starting to look like its pre-pandemic self. Openings are marching resolutely downward. Fewer people are quitting. Unemployment is still low. Recently, we learned that the labor market is generally doing pretty well in aggregate (see the ADP National Employment Report, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey and establishment survey). But jobs aren’t the whole story, not by a long shot. Wages link the job market to inflation, and while hiring might be normalizing, pay patterns are changing dramatically.
Read more
June 10, 2024
Main Street Macro: AI and the global workforce
Artificial intelligence—heard of it? Of course, you have. In the past year, advanced AI has made its presence known on Main Street and worldwide. What we know as generative AI has been around in less-sophisticated forms for decades, but it only recently captured the public’s imagination with the release of inexpensive tools that create content on the fly. In our annual global survey, the ADP Research Institute asked nearly 35,000 private-sector workers in 18 countries how they felt about artificial intelligence. Here’s what they told us.
Read more
