Page 8 - Statistics Group News Today

-- this post authored by David Dam, Meghana Gaur, Fatih Karahan, Laura Pilossoph, and Will Schirmer The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the various measures put in place to contain it caused a rapid deterioration in labor market conditions for many workers and plunged the nation into recession. The unemployment rate increased dramatically during the COVID recession, rising from 3.5 percent in February to 14.8 percent in April, accompanied by an almost three percentage point decline in labor force...

Up On Main Street -- this post authored by Donald P. Morgan and Steph Clampitt The Main Street Lending Program was the last of the facilities launched by the Fed and Treasury to support the flow of credit during the COVID-19 pandemic. The others primarily targeted Wall Street borrowers; Main Street was for smaller firms that rely more on banks for credit. It was a complicated program that worked by purchasing loans and sharing risk with lenders. Despite its delayed launch, Main Street purchased...

These California Workers Will Be Left Behind Even When Jobs Recover from COVID By Mark Kreidler On 2/12/21 at 6:37 PM EST This story is co-published with Capital & Main The early stages of the COVID-19 crisis in America wiped out so many jobs so quickly that it could be difficult to focus on a single area of the damage. More than 20 million workers lost their positions between February and April of 2020 alone, a 15 percent decline. But from the start, experts in economic inequities had a fee...

-- this post authored by Jonathan McCarthy The coronavirus pandemic and the various measures to address it have led to unprecedented convulsions to the U.S. and global economies. In this post, I examine those extraordinary impacts through the lens of personal consumption expenditures on discretionary and nondiscretionary services, a framework I developed in a 2011 post (and subsequently employed in 2012, 2014, and 2017). In particular, I show that there were exceptional declines in both service...

Messenger KUWAIT CITY, Jan 18: Despite the increase in the number of workers in government agencies that resulted in disguised unemployment for citizens due to some factors such as poor distribution process in government agencies — the major factor mentioned in several reports, citizens remain hesitant in taking certain jobs as shown in the statistics and manpower requests submitted to the Civil Service Commission (CSC), reports Al- Jarida daily. This indicates scarcity of applicants for some...

-- this post authored by Julian di Giovanni The recent era of globalization has witnessed growing cross-country trade integration as firms’ production chains have spread across the world, and with stock market returns becoming more correlated across countries. While research has predominantly focused on how financial integration impacts the propagation of shocks across international financial markets, trade also influences these cross-border spillovers. In particular, one important aspect, hi...

An annual tradition at Liberty Street Economics is to present our most‑read posts of the year. Given the events of 2020, New York Fed economists and guest coauthors focused their analysis on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, writing some seventy articles since March on the subject. Our leading posts, in terms of traffic, all touch on the theme in some way. Consider this space a hub for COVID-19 coverage for some time to come, and take a look back at the top five posts grabbing attenti...

from Liberty Street Economics Even after the unprecedented stimulus by central banks in Europe following the global financial crisis, Europe’s economic growth and inflation have remained depressed, consistently undershooting projections. In a striking resemblance to Japan’s “lost decades," the European economy has been recently characterized by persistently low interest rates and the provision of cheap bank credit to impaired firms, or “zombie credit." In this post, based on a recent st...