FEATURED POST
June 24, 2025
From good to gloom. Main Street is bracing for a slowdown.
By almost every metric that matters, the U.S. economy has delivered in the first six months of 2025. Unemployment stayed low, consumers kept spending, and inflation retreated. Despite this encouraging performance, the economic outlook has dimmed. When Federal Reserve policymakers met last week to decide whether to cut interest rates, their individual forecasts combined painted a cautious picture.
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April 15, 2024
Main Street Macro: All that glitters
Last week’s hotter-than-expected inflation report surprised and rattled investors. The Consumer Price Index accelerated by 0.4 percent in March from the previous month. After a months-long slowdown, price increases in February and March reached their highest level since September and put the annual rate of inflation at 3.5 percent, firmly out of reach of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
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April 8, 2024
Main Street Macro: Manufacturing: A Cinderella story
I grew up in Indiana, a big basketball state, so college ball has a special place in my heart. My favorite part of the NCAA college tournament has always been the Cinderella team, those players that surprise everyone with a winning streak. The economy’s winning streak isn’t a big surprise
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April 1, 2024
Main Street Macro: The good and the bad of stress
If you've ever had a job, you’ve probably experienced stress at work. There's no shame in it. But could workplace stress actually be a good thing? We examined this question, and found an answer.
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March 25, 2024
Main Street Macro: How to catch a moving target
Change is a constant theme on this blog. That’s not only because the Main Street economy is always in motion, which it is, but also because big, long-in-the-making changes have begun rapidly shifting the economic landscape. For business leaders and decision-makers, it can be hard to keep up, let alone catch changing trends.
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March 18, 2024
Main Street Macro: The new geography of work
Anyone who has ever done any hiring knows it’s not always easy to find the right person for the job. And if you’ve been on the other side of the interview table, you know that finding the right company to work for also can be challenging, even in a good economy. This matching process between job candidates and hiring managers has changed a lot over the last four years due to the growth of remote-work arrangements.
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March 11, 2024
Main Street Macro: Missing the Mark: Trends in teacher salary
Teachers are a crucial part of the economy. I should know–my mom is a teacher. They’re part of the care economy, often described by economists as the workforce behind the workforce. In a new analysis, the ADP Research Institute’s Jeff Nezaj shows that even though the U.S. economy continues to add jobs at a rapid clip, the education sector is trailing behind. Here are three key findings.
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March 4, 2024
Main Street Macro: What non-economists get wrong
Economists sometimes get their forecasts wrong. First, we say inflation will be transitory. Then we say there will be a soft – no, wait! – a hard landing. A recession! Or maybe, definitely, a soft landing.
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February 26, 2024
Main Street Macro: The shrinking work week
Are you working fewer hours now than you did before the pandemic? If the answer is yes, you have a lot of company.
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