Media clips
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Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, disagreed. He called the IMF’s assessment “out of date and mistaken.” “The fact is that China is still intervening heavily in the foreign currency market,” he said. “It simply stopped engaging in traditional purchases of foreign exchange reserves held by the Central Bank.” What China has done instead, he said, “is switch over to a great increase of its holdings of sovereign wealth funds — government-controlled investment in private stocks, bonds, commodities, lands and real estate abroad.”
Voice of America May 28, 2015 -
An analysis of College Board and government data published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute finds the Class of 2015 will likely see lower wages than cohorts who graduated into better job markets for as long as 15 years.
Those choices put them at a lower rung of the career ladder at a critical moment in their careers, said the EPI’s Elise Gould, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball in the report. While young workers will likely move up the company hierarchy or move to more lucrative careers over time, erasing that initial wage disparity could take well more than a decade, they say.
Bloomberg May 28, 2015 -
Workers with bachelor’s degrees saw their average hourly wage drop to $29.55 in 2014, down 1.3% from a year earlier, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Labor Department data. Those with advanced degrees saw their earnings fall 2.2% to $38.20.
Cities and states have been boosting the minimum wage, which generally lifts the earnings of the least educated, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Recent grads, ages 21 to 24, are making 2% less than they were in 2007 and 2.5% less than in 2000, according to an Economic Policy Institute report released Wednesday.
CNN Money May 28, 2015 -
The tepid demand for workers and weak wage growth that continues to hamper the U.S. job market is forcing many newly minted college graduates into low-paying, low-skilled jobs, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. And that’s for those who are lucky enough to find a full-time job, given that the ranks of recent college grads who are underemployed have continued to swell in recent years.
“The class of 2015 is entering an economy that’s still recovering from the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, on a conference call to discuss the study. They are joining “six other classes of students who have graduated into a weak economy in recent years.
CBS Moneywatch May 28, 2015 -
The findings demonstrate that the hangover from the financial crisis and downturn of 2007 to 2009 still weighs heavily on family balance sheets. “We are failing as an economy if we have a huge swath of American households who can’t come up with $400,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The really dire financial situations” of many survey respondents can be largely attributed to “the fact that we’re still far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.”
Bloomberg May 28, 2015 -
Since the 1970s, there’s been a disconnect between productivity and wages, so even as workers produce more, they don’t necessarily see the benefits. “We have created lots of income, lots of output, lots of wealth over the last three decades,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute. “The problem is it has not accrued to the vast majority.”
Virtually all of the gains have gone to those at the top of the income scale. In the past, politicians have sometimes tried to address that through the tax code: taking a slightly larger cut from the wealthy and using tax credits to pad the pockets of the poor. But there are political limits to that approach. Some people consider such government redistribution akin to adding or taking away points after the whistle has blown. Mishel and others argue that policymakers need to focus more on shaping the rules of the economic game, so average workers can command higher pretax wages. “The problems with people’s paychecks is not what the federal government is taking out in taxes. It’s what employers are not putting in,” Mishel said.
NPR May 27, 2015 -
The resulting plans present a menu of options — some unexpectedly overlapping, some radically and predictably diverging — prepared by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nascent 2016 campaign would benefit if candidates were asked to identify which of these plans best expresses their governing priorities — or what their alternative would be.
The Washington Post May 27, 2015 -
Minimum wage as starter salary? Nonsense. The average age of a minimum wage worker in the United States is about 35, and 88% are over 20 years old, according to a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI also found that 55% are full-time workers, and 28% have children.
Los Angeles Times May 27, 2015 -
Still, according to research coming out on Wednesday from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young college graduates is down to 7.2 percent, lower than it was during the worst of the Great Recession but still well above historical norms.
Politico May 27, 2015 -
The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.
The New York Times May 26, 2015