Real Disposable Income Per Capita

So how does the current recovery stack up against other recoveries? One measure that seems meaningful to me is real disposable income per capita - rather than staring blankly at aggregate measures that ignore population growth - what kind of purchasing power to individuals have after the necessities? (and even this ignores distribution issues)

So courtesy of the good people at BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis) we have here Series A229RX0, Real Disposable Personal Income: Per capita in chained 2005 dollars. I've smoothed it a bit with a three month moving average to reduce the noise.


Now I wanted to look at year over year changes (yes yes even though this is a seasonally adjusted series) to see what kind of annual growth is being experienced in this measure of economic well being.

So things look a bit anemic for the last several months.


And the question occurred to me, how to compare the year over year performance of this measure over the course of this recovery in comparison to other recoveries, so I normalized to the start dates of the respective recoveries since 1980. One note, as we are in month 31 of the current recovery, when we index the 1980 recovery the subsequent 31 months include the entire second recession of the "double dip".

The thing that really grabbed me I've highlighted in the callout is that the 1980 recovery outperformed the current recovery with respect to this metric - by 70% for the period of the second recession - that is, real per capita disposable income growth in the second recession of the "double dip" outpaced the growth in the current recovery over 70% of the time during the period of the second recession, and 84% of the time over the course of the entire 31 months that corresponds to the latest data point available in the current recovery, January, 2012.

Finally, I have to wonder what this looks like when it is broken out by income quintiles...

Whither Commercial Paper?

So it has been awhile since I took a look at commercial paper, so I wandered over to the FRB Outstandings web site to take a look... this is the non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) weekly data in a 4 week moving average (MA).


So the recovery begins more or less where the total outstanding amount approximatley flatlines after the kickoff with the epic ablation of asset backed commercial paper.


NSA data is well suited for looking at year over year changes, so we'll start looking at the year over year change in the 4 week MA of the total amount of commercial paper outstanding on a NSA basis.

As we can see, the total amount of outstanding commercial paper began to decline on a year over year basis around the end of 3Q2011.


Commerical paper is a 1 to 270 day promissary note, broadly bucketed into three categories: financial, asset backed and non-financial in order of amount outstanding. Financial commercial paper is issued by financial institutions of varying stripes, non-financial is any other type of institution and typically used to finance inventories, while asset backed commercial paper is issued from a bankruptcy remote SPV that sells the paper to purchase the assets from the financial institution (general descriptions, anyone who would like to add to that please do so in the comments). So a year over year look at the different categories:

We see that:
1. Asset backed commercial paper has yet to go positive on year over year basis since the onset of the Great Recession
2. Financial commericial paper went negative on a year over year basis around the end of 3Q2011
3. Non-financial commercial paper is showing strong growth on a year over year basis, though that appears to be decelerating

The strength of the non-financial commericial paper is encouraging, given its place in the real economy. However, in the onset of the Great Recession we saw that it was the last of the categories of commercial paper to decline on a year over year basis, and it currently constitutes 18% of the outstanding amount.

So what do you think this means?

Different This Time Redux - Labor Force Declines

First posted on this back in February of last year:
Different This Time - More on Labor Force Declines

Here is the update with another year of annual data from BLS Series LNU00000000, LNU01000000 and LNU05000000:




In summary, it is clearly different this time, as only 2009, 2010 and 2011 year over year changes show consecutive declines in the size of the labor force and consecutive year over year increases in the not in labor force greater than the increases in population. The pace of the change suggests more than demographics to me, and as Barry R. says, "What say ye?"

DOT Miles Driven: Overlay 2007-2011

Things that make me go hmmm... I tend to take that view that the economy is a heat engine, this looks like less heat to me... along with this:

IEA Oil Market Report US Motor Gasoline Demand

Here is the data source, go to September 2011 and click on the .xls version - you will find it on the Data tab in column I - enjoy!
US DOT Data Source

We Will Be Exploring the Limits of Storage for Natural Gas

So I've been watching storage for the natty for some time now, and it struck me that I should put up a post on it as I think we are about to explore the physical limits of the natural gas storage system in the USA...

Thanks to the good people at the EIA, I downloaded the data for natural gas storage levels from their weekly report (Thursday mornings). I constructed a 4 week moving average to smooth things out a tad and then looked at the month over month change on a percentage basis, with each year set up as an overlay.

Short version: we are coming in 'hot', and in absolute terms the last storage report was 0.2% under the previous all time high, I expect we punch through next week (I may get expelled from the economics profession for calling both direction and time). Will coal switching provide sufficient demand to set the price floor this time around?


I've added this plot to illustrate what I have been talking about - here are 12 month moving averages for natural gas production and the front month Henry Hub natural gas contract - note the divergence and even the accelerating natural gas production as prices grind lower... and lower...

U-3 Unemployment Rates from Recession Peak to Expansion Trough

Some descriptive statistics of the behavior of U-3 across all post-WWII business cycles using UNRATE and the NBER cycle dating.

The top of each red column corresponds to the peak in the U-3 unemployment rate associated with a particular recession, typically happening after that recession has ended. The lower end of each red column corresponds with the trough in the U-3 unemployment rate experienced prior to the onset of the next recession... note that for the last bar on the chart, the current trough is provisional (the low to date was 8.8% in March, 2011 while in September, 2011 that is 9.1%).

DJIA Volatility - What Next?

So is this the start of something?

First, what we are looking at - a five day intra-day range of the DJIA divided by the five day average of the close - and the absolute level of the Dow 30 index.

Now, what next? Note the observation of the shorting ban is roughly contemporaneous with the Lehman failure... no claims as to causality, but we may be getting some additional insight into that with the recent moves by several markets within the EU to ban shorting... time will tell.