The U.S.-China trade war entered new territory when President Donald Trump last week ordered more tariffs on $300 billion worth of goods from China.
Each month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its Employment Situation report. This report includes about two dozen distinct datasets that can help economists, journalists and the public understand the health of the nation’s economy. It’s where to find monthly changes to the number of people employed and the unemployment rate, and it’s a report that’s widely covered in the media, but isn’t always covered with much context.
High-level finance ministers and officials from some of the most economically powerful countries in the world will convene when the G-20 meets June 28-29 in Osaka, Japan.
As the Federal Reserve bumped interest rates more than 4 percentage points in the lead-up to the Great Recession, investors steered toward increasingly risky bets on the U.S. housing market, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Houses are built to stay upright. We eat in them, sleep in them, we produce trash that goes out, and we purchase goods that come in. But when there’s an earthquake, houses that are less structurally sound may collapse. If the house is destroyed, the normal equilibrium of things going in and out changes. New products and services are brought in to rebuild the house. Old products and services become less essential for a time.
The old balance gives way to a new normal.
The skills and knowledge needed to be a journalist in the United States keep growing as shrinking newsrooms try to do more with less. A new study of job ads suggests media outlets now want journalists to be more innovative, demonstrating expertise in areas such as web development, audience analytics and Python, the computer programming language.
When the economy enters a recession, pundits are quick to trot out unemployment numbers to argue about the health of the economy or the success of the government’s response.
Of course, job loss should be front and center when talking about the economy, but companies have more options than just hiring and firing employees.
A common criticism aimed at journalists is their tendency to portray some groups in the United States as “the other” — framing stories as though certain groups aren’t part of the world where journalists themselves and the bulk of their audiences live. Think rural America.
