The current worldwide question is to ask which way the economy will go -- up, down, or stall for a while.
Politicians are fond of taking credit for prosperous years, even as they blame their predecessors for any downturn. This week, however, statistics offered mixed signals as to where we are and where we're going.
Part of that is the mixing of different sets of data marking different aspects of the economy over different time periods and using different methods of data collection. Count 'em. That's four different sets of numbers, each collected differently.
Unemployment data comes from a telephone sample survey, while the numbers of people actually working is a solid collection of payroll data.
Meanwhile, jobs data are measured monthly, but spending habits are counted quarterly. In between, many things can happen, and often do.
It has been reported that the retail price of gasoline, as drivers go to their local pumping stations, nearly doubled after war broke out in Ukraine. Never mind that most of the gasoline sold in America comes from America and other parts of the world, or that it takes many months for the product to travel from the drilling site, through refineries and eventually to the local filling stations.
No surprise, then, that petrol companies reported a huge jump in profits in the first few months after the war began.
It's called greed.
As for the demand that government step in to control this greed -- massive instant price hikes after a prediction of long-term shortages, limited ones at that -- either free enterprise rules the economy or government controls business activity.
You can't have it both ways, so somewhere in the middle would be the better solution. This is what corporate America fought labor unions about -- fair treatment versus greed.
Politicians are fond of taking credit for prosperous years, even as they blame their predecessors for any downturn. This week, however, statistics offered mixed signals as to where we are and where we're going.
Part of that is the mixing of different sets of data marking different aspects of the economy over different time periods and using different methods of data collection. Count 'em. That's four different sets of numbers, each collected differently.
Unemployment data comes from a telephone sample survey, while the numbers of people actually working is a solid collection of payroll data.
Meanwhile, jobs data are measured monthly, but spending habits are counted quarterly. In between, many things can happen, and often do.
It has been reported that the retail price of gasoline, as drivers go to their local pumping stations, nearly doubled after war broke out in Ukraine. Never mind that most of the gasoline sold in America comes from America and other parts of the world, or that it takes many months for the product to travel from the drilling site, through refineries and eventually to the local filling stations.
No surprise, then, that petrol companies reported a huge jump in profits in the first few months after the war began.
It's called greed.
As for the demand that government step in to control this greed -- massive instant price hikes after a prediction of long-term shortages, limited ones at that -- either free enterprise rules the economy or government controls business activity.
You can't have it both ways, so somewhere in the middle would be the better solution. This is what corporate America fought labor unions about -- fair treatment versus greed.
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