FEATURED POST
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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June 3, 2024
Main Street Macro: The elusive Goldilocks economy
When economists tell tales about the economy, it’s never about the Cinderella economy or the Snow White economy. It’s almost always the Goldilocks economy. Because that’s what economists want: Growth that’s not too fast and not too slow, where inflation is neither too hot nor too cold, and hiring isn’t too strong or too weak.
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May 20, 2024
Main Street Macro: Staycation, road trip, or none of the above?
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of the summer vacation season in the United States, but with consumers looking downbeat recently, the question is whether they’ll be hitting the road in force like they did last year. How people spend their time off this year–be it binge-watching Netflix from the couch or flying to Hawaii–can tell us a lot about how the economy will perform in 2024.
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May 13, 2024
Main Street Macro: Are consumers still all right? An update
Last week, a measure of consumer sentiment showed that people are more downbeat about their current and future economic well-being than they were a month ago. With the stock market reaching new highs in May, gas prices falling, and unemployment below 4 percent for the longest time since the 1960s, this gloomy shift is puzzling.
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May 6, 2024
Main Street Macro: What the pay gap says about inflation
One of the puzzles of today’s economy is inflation: Why isn’t it falling as fast as economists or the Federal Reserve expected? Inflation has slowed a lot over the past year, but recently it has stubbornly defied expectations of further declines.
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