Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Economic Recovery in One Chart (Musical Tribute)

The following chart shows real wage and salary disbursements per capita (February 2013 dollars).


Click to enlarge.

We've recovered to February of 1999. No joke! Time to party again!



Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

7 comments:

Jazzbumpa said...

I don't know how to verify this, but it does seem plausible.

A couple of weeks ago, Thom Hartmann stated that since the 2009 trough, more than 100% of the recovery gains have gone to the top x percent, where X is some small number that I don't remember.

Stated another way, not only have the oligarchs capture every penny of the gain, they have taken even more away from the rest of us.

And the populism in this country is of the right wing variety.

Awesome.

WASF
JzB

Jazzbumpa said...

BTW, did you know that you can ignore the often indecipherable numbers and just type the letter string in the WV?

Works like a charm.

JzB

dearieme said...

I think that another great financial panic could be on its way. Remembering Keynes' dictum that the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, I think I'll need to indulge the market's conviction that the safest place to put its money is into US Treasuries. So I'm considering buying an ETF of TIPS, on the assumption that buying TIPS themselves is not for the small UK investor.

Wotcha think?

Stagflationary Mark said...

Jazzbumpa,

And put yet another way...

St. Louis Fed: Income Gini Ratio for Households by Race of Householder, All Races

I was not aware of the word verification quirk. Thanks for sharing!

Stagflationary Mark said...

dearieme,

I'm not sure I can offer a useful opinion but I'll try.

1. I doubt the ETF called TIP performs much better than buried cash thanks to the negative real yield at the shorter end of the real yield curve. The fund could even do much worse if we get another deflationary crash. (It did crash last time.)

2. I no longer use the fund TIP to hold my short-term cash because of that. Instead I have parked it in an online savings account earning about 0.7% nominal.

3. I really prefer buying the bonds and holding to maturity, but like you say, that is probably not an option for you.

4. You would be taking on extra currency risk by being in the UK and investing in US dollar denominated bonds. That risk may be a reward though. I would not hazard a guess. As for me, my expenses are in US dollars so that's one reason I don't mind being in US dollar denominated bonds.

5. I'm not sure I'd feel the same way if I was in Europe though. Perhaps I would mind being in Euro denominated bonds. I have yet to be tempted to buy anything denominated in Euros, lol. Sigh.

6. Put another way... If the US is financially @#$%ed over the long-term (more than likely), then I'd say Europe is financially cluster@#$%ed. It's all relative. Just an opinion!

7. I vastly prefer I-Bonds and EE-Bonds to the TIP fund. Once again, probably not an option for you.

dearieme said...

Thanks for that. Perhaps it's time to look at Norwegian Krone again, instead.

Stagflationary Mark said...

dearieme,

The UK CPI trend since 2000 is a bit disturbing. Or not. Hard to say. At the very least I'd be nervous though.