Congratulations Workers: You Make 0.3% More Per Hour Than One Year Ago

In real terms, workers make 0.3% more per hour than a year ago, assuming one believes the BLS CPI Statistics.

Author:: Mish
Publish date:: Jun 6, 2018

In real terms, workers make 0.3% more per hour than a year ago, assuming one believes the BLS CPI Statistics.

Once again, we can trace this back to Nixon Shock.

Real Compensation Per Hour

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Trade Imbalance

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Median Home Prices

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Real GDP vs Total Credit Market Debt

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The Fed discontinued the total credit market series in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Total; credit market debt was roughly $1.7 trillion when Nixon closed the gold window. At last report it was $68.6 trillion.

It takes massive amounts of increasing credit to produce relatively trivial increases in GDP.

Gold vs Faith in Central Banks

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Everything Under Control?

If you don't think so, buy gold.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

In real (inflation-adjusted) terms workers make 0.5% more than a year ago, assuming one believes the CPI.

Real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers are up precisely one penny per hour from January of 2017.

The average worker makes a penny more per hour than last month in real terms. The year-over-year gain is precisely zero.

Hourly wages, in real terms, have been on the decline for nine months.

Economists keep expecting a big boom in consumer spending. They also expect a huge wage-price spiral. I expect neither. Let’s investigate.

Real (inflation-adjusted) income rose 0.1% in November. Expenditures rose 0.4%. Per capita, income is stagnant.

Today's CPI report that shows inflation rose only 0.1%. Real wages are not keeping up even with that.

Real wages for production workers fell 0.2% in Dec. Real wages for all employees fell 0.1%. Both barely up from yr ago.