The notion that an assumed "double dip" in housing prices might cause a double dip in real GDP confuses home prices with homebuilding. Many who now warn of grave dangers arising from a brief dip in the Case-Shiller index are the same folks who once told us, quite incorrectly, that the economy could never... More

You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.

Vehicle sales in the U.S. this year, at 10.4 million units YTD, are running 11.1% above last year's sales of 9.375 million units.  

This chart shows the increase in Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of owner-occupied loans where the loans have less than 5% down. Having Fannie and Freddie purchase these loans means that a lot more people are going to be able to buy houses than before.

A good rule of thumb is that you should often buy when the rent ratio--the price of a typical home divided by the annual cost of renting that home--is below 15 and rent when the ratio is above 20. Yet even though the country has suffered through a terrible crash in home prices,  buying a house remains an iffy proposition in many markets when the rent ratio is considered.

The results of the 2010 decennial count generated a lot of attention on television and online, in part because of the announcement of which states would be gaining or losing representation in Congress. The population trends that are driving reapportionment, however, have wider implications beyond how many members of Congress a state sends to Washington. With this calculator you can pick a state, a start date and an end date... More

IRS employees must have had a busy weekend, as they already have the 2011 withholding tables that take into account the tax compromise bill signed into law by President Obama on Friday. Key changes are the end of the Making Work Pay credit and the 2 percentage point reduction in payroll taxes.

Homes  constitute an important source of capital for small business owners and the impact of the recent decline in housing prices is significant enough to be a real constraint on small business finances.

Turn over your iPhone and you'll see that it's "assembled in China." But that doesn’t mean that most of the profits or revenue go there.  It also doesn't mean that your purchase of an iPhone contributed... More

If things feel more decrepit and worn-out these days, it’s because they are. The average age of the U.S.  capital stock is at a 40-year high in all three major categories:  nonresidential, residential, and government.

So who pays the estate tax? What parts of the country are most affected by it? Here is a table that ranks the 50 states based on federal estate tax collections per capita for the year 2009.

American attitudes today form an interesting contrast with many of the public's views during the Great Depression of the 1930s, not only on economic, political and social issues, but also on the role of government in addressing them.

When state and local governments want to spend more than they collect in revenues, they issue bonds. Such bonds are a longstanding feature of the American landscape, going back at least as far as 1812, but during the last decade they have spun out of control, as states and cities have increased their borrowing to indulge in more and more spending on new stadiums, schools, bridges, and museums. They have even started borrowing to... More

The national debt data used in the charts here is for the United States' total public debt outstanding, which includes the so-called intragovernmental holdings category, which mostly represents where surplus Social Security tax collections have gone since the early 1980s.

The financial crisis has been hard on just about everyone. But for older folks, the pain is proving particularly deep and lasting — a problem that could put a drag on the economy for many years to come.

One of the great oddities of the current job market is that job openings (as reported by the BLS) and help wanted online ads (as reported by the Conference Board) have both been on the rise over the past year.  These are usually signs of good labor demand. However, actual new hires and employment growth have only edged up mildly. In other... More

This year and in upcoming years, local governments expect to constrain spending and
services—primarily because of reductions in state aid and falling revenues. In particular, revenues from property taxes are poised to decline to reflect lower property values.

Two competing forces affect self-employment and entrepreneurship rates. One is opportunity: how much demand there is for the good or service your new company would offer. The other is opportunity cost: what you’d be giving up by starting a business.

The U.S. federal government's total spending has changed with respect to the level of the median U.S. household's income in every year from 1967 through 2009.

President Obama’s Fiscal Commission has released its final plan, part of which concerns steps to make the Social Security program solvent over the long term. The table attached shows benefits for different illustrative earnings types for individuals retiring in the year 2050.

It’s always dangerous to put much too much stock in a single month's report. But this month’s version does seem to change the picture. Before the report, you could see the early signs of a recovery again starting to pick up speed: the black line above was moving up, as it had in early 2010. Now it appears to be moving sideways again, as it did last summer.

House prices have obviously fallen a lot since the peak of the bubble, and this has left many homeowners “underwater”, so to speak, meaning they owe more on their mortgages than their house is worth. This is potentially causing a big decrease in people’s willingness to move, which includes moving for a job. This, in turn, is potentially causing higher unemployment.

The increase in November's unemployment rate was fueled by higher joblessness among the lowest skilled and highest skilled workers. Unemployment was higher last month compared with the summer on a seasonally adjusted basis for those with a high school education, and those with a college degree or better. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The unemployment rate for college graduates hit 5.1%, the high for this cycle and most likely a record.  Is this  the “darkest before the dawn” moment, and will we start seeing a real recovery in at least the top-end labor market in 2011?

You can argue that the employee health care deduction basically explains the entire cost differential between American systems and the others.  Take a look at this graph:

As of 2008 greater education was generally associated with lower rates of motherhood — except for women with the  most advanced degrees. That is, women with professional degrees and Ph.D.’s are slightly more likely to have had children than their counterparts with just master’s or bachelor’s degrees.