Itamar Drechsler

Housing construction is going to get kicked in the nuts, between a fall in the construction labor force, tariffs on raw materials, and rates remaining high due to concerns about inflation, which are heightened by the supply shock of the tariff.

true and its so tiresome

Such a great guitarist and all around musician

It’s already a serious social problem. Raising rates to make housing more affordable is driving against traffic. We’re under-built. All it does is temporarily put the cost in the mortgage rather than the house price, while decreasing supply.

You were wrong. This is what most economics editorials are. The better economics discussions are on (some) podcasts.

15 mins way too long for that

Larry David had a joke in his standup routine about how difficult it must have been to live next door to Jonas Salk's mother, since she must have been constantly reminding everyone how her son saved the world from polio. I would have thought that joke was timeless, but turns out it's not.

So Kennedy wants to cancel the polio vaccine. Seeing as how i've never met anyone with polio, i'd have thought this matter was kind of closed. But apparently the brain worm puts revisiting this high on the agenda.

This completely isn’t cheap pandering.

It was great to hear this said clearly. Pandemic disrupted supply chain decreased productivity. Inflation rose as productivity fell. When supply chains recovered, productivity rebounded and inflation fell. This was why employment strengthened as inflation fell rather than weakened.

Incredible, from an interview with the new Stanford President

Right now supply chain people must be thinking of Michael Corleone’s famous line from Godfather Part 3

America's Productivity Boom US Productivity Growth is Booming and Massively Outshining its Peers—Here's How

NEW from me:

US productivity growth, the bedrock of long-run prosperity, is booming—and massively outshining peer nations. It's the fruit of running the labor market hot post-COVID, and now it's delivering higher wages, consumption, & welfare for Americans🧵

Joey, do you know what’s the evidence on whether remote work had any role in this? It’s coincident and a big change and arguably catalyzed the high job switching.

Didn’t just feel like that.

Bush years bookended by 9/11 and global crisis with manufactured iraq debacle in between. Not too much to like.

Those were pretty great years economically and US was riding high post Cold War.

Definitely agree. I think the anger about the bailouts is overstated. It came and went and is quite abstract anyway. For sure it was frustrating but if anything subsequent events suggest letting Lehman fail was cutting your nose to spite your face. The anger should have been how it got to that.

The big fall was during the Nixon administration between Vietnam and watergate. Seems like there was a temporary increase after 9/11 that didn’t last long.

Hard for me to believe bailouts was
the main thing. I’m not even convinced the loss in trust wasn’t already there beforehand. The anti-government streak was pretty fashionable since
Reagan if not before.

4th highest S&P 500 trailing P/E in past 124 years.

(via B of A) $SPX

no better evidence that we’ve got a couple trillion-dollar squatters holding the internet back than the fact that a company with 20 employees can make a better platform than Meta

Employee compensation is 5X bigger than corporate profits, but since 2020 the increase in real dollars has been close to a 50/50 split between these two parts.

I wanted to post the graphic inline below comparing growth in real employee compensation and real corporate profits since 2017. The story about real wages not growing much since 2020 is not that GDP didn't grow, it's that a surprisingly large share has gone into corporate profits.

Here's what 2016-2019 look liked, indexed to 100 at start. The two components grew at the same rate.
fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgr...

If the real dollar increase had gone into wages instead, they would have risen nearly twice as much. (Wages are on the right)
fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgr...

I knew this before but looking at this again it's surprising how much corporate profits grew (in real terms) since the onset of covid. In real dollars they grew about as much as employee compensation even though the latter is at least 5X as big.
fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Bt...

Me too. Perpetuating the same wrong narrative lacking evidence.

Struck by how vastly better Bluesky is for engagement over X. This is today's column. Blueksy numbers far higher, despite 7x more followers on X. Forget all this "liberal silo" balls. For publicising work it's just a better place to be.

The music was inarguably top notch