“I think they will look back on this as a mistake,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said of the rate increase. “This threatens to snuff out the very beginning of wage gains that we’ve started to see recently in the data. The Fed should allow the expansion’s gains to reach more broadly into the work force and get off the steady escalator of ever-higher interest rates.”
The New York Times
December 20, 2018
“[T]here have been real signals flashing in the data that these past rate hikes are starting to slow the economy,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “By 2019, this drag from higher interest rates will no longer be counterbalanced by greater fiscal stimulus, and the pace of economic growth could slow markedly.”
CBS News
December 20, 2018
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute isn’t happy with today’s Federal Reserve rate rise and warns acting now will hurt everyday people. “While rate hikes over the past couple of years have been premature in the face of tame inflation, coming into this month’s FOMC meeting there have been real signals flashing in the data that these past rate hikes are starting to slow the economy,” the group said. The rate hike “threatens to snuff out the very beginning of wage gains that we’ve started to see recently in the data.” The group would have liked to see the Fed hold steady on rates and allow wage gains to heat up, in large part because there’s no real inflation pressure threatening the economy.
Wall Street Journal
December 20, 2018
RISING RATES, LESS RAISES: The Federal Reserve raised its main borrowing rate on Wednesday for the fourth time this year, brushing aside calls from President Donald Trump to hold off on further interest rate hikes, POLITICO’s Victoria Guida reports. Though the move comes as the central bank underscores the growing number of jobs amid a low unemployment rate, Josh Bivens, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Morning Shift the hikes have begun to slow the economy and “give workers less leverage.”
“As unemployment has gotten low, we have finally started to see a small uptick in wage growth,” Bivens said. “I think that’s going to be short lived if they keep on the path of interest rate hikes.” The Fed indicated Wednesday that fewer rate hikes might be on the way next year based on expectations for slower economic growth, according to Guida. More from POLITICO here.
Politico Pro
December 20, 2018
In recent months, both wages and domestic capital investment have inched up, but at nowhere near the level of the increase in the return to shareholders. As the terrific new study by Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute makes clear, the single most important factor in the past-four-decades’ diversion of business income from workers to shareholders and executives is the success of business’s assault on worker power, and the concomitant success of business’s insistence that government favor the rich over everyone else.
The American Prospect
December 20, 2018
Political decisions by elected officials are largely responsible for a “collapse in pay for the bottom 90 percent” of the labor market since 1979, according to a new analysis of wage stagnation by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. (Whole story)
Washington Post
December 17, 2018
Average weekly earnings for these retail workers “would decline by as much as 7 percent” and between 1 percent and 3 percent “in the bulk” of the markets affected by the merger, the report released by the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute said. (Whole story)
Kansas City Star
December 17, 2018
Robert E. Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, discusses a report on the impact of President Donald Trump’s metal tariffs on the domestic aluminum industry. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Romaine Bostick on “What’d You Miss?”
Bloomberg
December 17, 2018
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released new research that shows after Section 232 tariffs were imposed on aluminum (and steel) in March 2018, the domestic producers of both primary and downstream aluminum products have made commitments to create over 3,000 jobs. At the same time, these domestic producers should generate over $3.4 billion in new investments and substantially increase domestic production of aluminum. Robert Scott, director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research, explains that in early 2017, the U.S. primary aluminum industry had almost disappeared completely. Between 2010 and 2017, 18 of 23 aluminum smelters shut down, eliminating roughly 13,000 jobs. In 2016, there were three alumina refineries supplying U.S. smelters, and by 2017, only one remained in operation. (whole story)
24/7 Wall St.
December 17, 2018