Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the value of all the goods and service produced. Along with job numbers, GDP is among the best indicators for economic performance. The U.S. saw the largest decline in GDP in history in Q2 2020 due to the pandemic, plunging 31.4 percent on an inflation-adjusted annualized basis. That was followed …Read more
Jobs continue to be recovered since the plunge seen at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Though the U.S. recouped another 379,000 jobs in February 2021 nationwide, there still remains 9.47 million yet to be brought back. The recovery rate of jobs, however, differs across the country. Various metrics for 380 of the Metropolitan …Read more
The U.S. continued recouping jobs lost a year ago at the onset of the pandemic, with 30 states posting jobs gains from January to February 2021 on a seasonally adjusted basis based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Six states posted no change in jobs from January to February while 14 states …Read more
The U.S. brought back another 379,000 jobs in February 2021, but still has yet to recover 9.46 million of the 22.46 million jobs lost in March and April of last year at the onset of the pandemic according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The unemployment rate slipped slightly from 6.3 percent in the …Read more
After growing for almost a decade, average credit card balances and debt dropped unexpectedly and precipitously in 2020. Total U.S. credit card debt retracted from $829 billion in 2019 to $756 billion in 2020 – an 8.8 percent decline. While there remained 10 million unemployed workers as of year-end 2020, the 142.6 million with jobs …Read more
Some things were different at the Super Bowl this year while others remained the same. New facets ranged from the miniscule 25,000 fans that were allowed in the stadium, to the never-before-seen 30,000 cardboard cut outs, and the almost 10,000 vacant seats due to the capacity restrictions. For the first-time in history, the Super Bowl …Read more
Who knew when reading Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities in high school or college that parts of this classic text were prophetic regarding the impact of the 2020 COVID pandemic? Just as with the Tale of Two Cities, some people are better off (economically speaking) while others are financially devasted. “It was the best …Read more
The U.S. added a miniscule 49,000 net new jobs in January 2021 (0.03 percent gain from December 2020) based on seasonally adjusted data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The previously reported December 2020 loss of 140,000 jobs was restated to a loss of 227,000. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 percent in …Read more
One positive from the 2020 pandemic is that the U.S. savings rate hit an all-time record high last year, at least among those that did not lose their jobs or had a cut in hours worked. While the U.S. personal savings rate averaged 8.8 percent monthly from 1959 through 2019, the average in 2020 was …Read more
Sixteen of the 380 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) ended 2020 with more jobs than they started with and one other broke even according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics using seasonally adjusted data. The 40 MSAs with the best performance (and fewest losses) are shown in the first table. The second table …Read more