Real Wage Decline Ended the 1981-92 Recession?

The BLS released preliminary annual benchmark revisions for March 2012. Nonfarm payroll series and private nonfarm payroll series, in logs, normalized to 2009M01, are shown below; adding on the revised levels for March 2012 yields the series shown in red.

Several observers have noted that exports have increased substantially since the President made his commitment to doubling exports. [1] The most recent GDP release confirms improvement in the net exports to GDP ratio (ex. oil imports) and real exports, and a BEA release from a month and a half ago confirms a rebound in manufacturing value added.

Deficit Hypocrisy Watch The WSJ editorial page last Thursday remarked upon: "...the worst fiscal record of any President in modern times..." Indeed, there has been a point in time when the Federal budget deficit, adjusted for how tax revenues and transfers responds to the state of the economy (what students in my undergraduate course are learning are called “automatic stabilizers”), hit a then record 4.4% as a share of potential GD

So says David Malpass in the WSJ: Data released this week by the Commerce Department waved bright red recession flags—orders for durable goods fell 13.2% in August and inflation-adjusted personal income fell 0.3%. ...

Joseph Lawler at the Spectator distills the Austrian perspective on the sources of current unemployment. Economists of a statist or Keynesian bent tend to posit that modern managers are quicker to fire employees and squeeze extra productivity out of their remaining workers, and then explore why that might be so. ...

I thought it useful to take a look at a few retrospective macro indicators pertaining the December 2010, three years after the beginning of what some term "the Great Recession".

Figure 1