I am a big believer the liability for the poor state of fiscal policy in the United States falls on the heads of both parties. Democrats and tax and spend while Republicans are borrow and spend. They both try to deflect blame and point the finger at the other. Cries of “we don’t control all the branches” and so on really fall on deaf ears for me. It is just so much nonsense I cannot believe it works for election campaigning. But it does. So let’s switch gears a bit and look at the political combinations and which are the worst for deficits. A side note here for those that scream about the debt ..read more

I got to wondering, with it now being a presidential election year, if this did anything special for the state’s economy. My immediate concern is not the specific mechanism generating a different economic outcome. I mean, for all we know it could be as simple as buying votes with policies favoring the state. I think this is essentially the policy of both parties in any year but that’s an issue to address in a different post at this point. So what would the appropriate metric be to look at for economic performance in presidential election years? I thought a bit about the typical GDP or personal ..read more

One of the questions I often receive is about economic recovery after COVID. This exercise is rife with measurement issues but for ND I come up with the following approach. For a variety of reasons that I will outline in future posts and in my research papers I use employment as my preferred economic measure. I forecast employment for ND starting in March of 2020, the onset of the COVID pandemic. I forecast out for 36 months and then compare to the actual values for employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The magnitude of the pandemic impact is clear. There is a significant drop, and ..read more

Bank again after recovering from the various health ailments. As you can see I maintain, as I have for the better part of two decades, that the unemployment rate in ND is too low. It is symptomatic of a larger problem, the lack of available labor. It represents a constraint on future economic development and growth prospects. Some take my last statement to mean growth or development will not happen. This generally makes me happy because I then get to scold them for not reading carefully. Growth and development can and will happen, I merely say they are constrained. That is, they are likely to ..read more

Fiscal resources are important regardless of the state you examine. The North Dakota Legislature meets on a biennial basis so I might make the argument an understanding of the fiscal revenue generation process is even more important in some ways. From a purely statistical perspective the biennial nature makes the seasonality of revenue generation interesting. For a first look at things I broke out the data for the total revenues by month of the biennium. The biennia run from July an odd number year through June of the next odd number year, so July of 2003 to June 2005 as an example. For interp ..read more

(This ended up being a longer post than I thought at the start but consider that your warning.) The Federal Reserve is still in the process of tightening rates as continued national labor market strength comes through in the data releases. Of course, there should be equal interest in the relationship between the funds rate and state level economic measures as well. In this post I focus on two labor market measures to see what we can glean from past circumstances of rate increases and labor market impacts in North Dakota. The funds rate (as seen below) is high, but really by recent standards on ..read more

The term is just not accurate. Over the last several months I encountered this term numerous times and like all fad phrases each definition is a little bit different than the others. All of that is irrelevant though since the key part of the term seems to be the same, and is just wrong. I seem to regularly encounter this term now to apply to people described as “not willing to go the extra mile” or “go beyond the specifics of their contract to get the job done.” Hmm. So people willing to live up to their contractual obligations, but not go beyond them, are somehow less than model employees? If ..read more

The week ahead is pretty busy but busy is good. First week of classes is always exciting for me so that is a plus. Presentation on rare earth elements and price fluctuation impacts on business models and industry structure. The big event for me is at the end of the week with a presentation on North Dakota economic conditions for the Minneapolis Fed Regional Economic Conditions Conference. I will discuss the overall lay of the land for the economy and explain some of what this means for going forward. Throughout the week I’ll post about some of these events ..read more

I claimed many times on the radio in the past that I am a true fiscal conservative, maybe the last, and I think it generated significant traction with the audience. I think most of the policy discussion around deficits and the fiscal trajectory of policy, if not engaging in outright obfuscation, is muddled at best. I think it is generally the case this term, fiscal conservative, is not defined at the start of discussions or vague notions of what people want it to mean are merely suggested. From where I stand right now the individuals held up as fiscal conservatives are typically in one of two ..read more

Taking a little foray into the world of international politics and economics with the post right now. I was shocked when I saw the breaking news that Chancellor Kwarteng was sacked first thing this morning. It was not so much due to a firing occurring because I think that is common practice in economic policy initiatives at the top level of government the world over. The shock came from the clear fact (at least to me) that this was not going to work. This would not lower the temperature on PM Truss in the least. And then came the press conference. It is difficult to say something was the worst ..read more