Nothing on topic I can think of. But this story about blue collar wages rising faster than college grad wages is interesting. The old I get the more I think the economy is almost entirely psychological. Sure, I do believe things like “If you print money, you will eventually get inflation,” and I’m sure money does have some degree of velocity, but I think increasingly that malaise drives bad times and eras of good feelings drive good economic times.
In this very divided country, are we going to see a bifurcated economy where depending on who’s in power drives who gains and who falls behind? It strikes me that the Obama years were very good for the very top and very bottom, and not so good for most other people. I can tell you that I personally am not feeling the booming “Trump Economy.” But I live in an area that doesn’t swing too hard in good times or bad times. I am also a college educated professional, so not in the current “era of good feelings” group.
I haven’t read this article yet, I’m guessing that demand for skilled labor is outstripping demand for a frequently worthless college education.
The ultimate article is Breitbart, but it’s mostly quoting Bureau of Labor statistics. But I agree, that might have something to do with it.
If I remember the statistic correctly, there are seven million unfilled jobs. Many of these are skilled, blue-collar jobs. Simply put, there are a lot of jobs out that that require skills in which people are not training. That means there are a high demand for them, while not a lot of supply. A lot of these aren’t jobs that people get visas to bring people in for either. There aren’t a lot of machinists brought in on H1-Bs or the equivalents. So wages for those types of jobs go up, because there just aren’t a lot of those kinds of people around.
Me, I’m a techno-weenie, like a lot of people in my part of the country, but if I had decided to become an electrician, I’d easily be making the same money I’m making now. Or even still going to college, but majoring instead in construction management, I’d probably be making even more.
I’m of the opinion that the only reason we haven’t seen inflation of consumer level goods is the printed money has been mostly confined to financial markets.
Big banks buy gov’t debt, sell gov’t debt to Fed at above market rates, use profits from printed $ to go buy higher yield debt and equities. Lather, rinse and repeat. It’s why damn junk bonds yield less than gov’t debt did 15 years ago. It’s also why the markets freak every time they fed starts to tighten.