Aaron Nathans

This morning we learned that job openings at employers nationwide have hit an all-time high, or at least since the Labor Department started collecting the data in 2001.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting take on why wage growth has been sluggish despite the general upward trend of the economy in recent years.

We are getting our first peek into economic data from the month of May this week, and so far it looks good, says Bob Hughes, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. That bodes well for Friday’s employment report, which is one of the key indicators of the strength of the economy.

The story of China’s overproduction of industrial goods, and its impact on the world economy, is well told in The Wall Street Journal. This story explains how the U.S. tire industry is hurting due to an oversupply of tires from China. The country built up its manufacturing capability, only to see growth slow and prices…

Headlines this morning had a decidedly downbeat tone about the economy, as the Commerce Department revised downward the already lackluster first-quarter gross domestic product numbers. But our senior research fellow, Bob Hughes, said a closer reading of this morning’s data shows the economy really isn’t too bad.

With the price of gasoline stabilizing, so has AIER’s Everyday Price Index. The index was unchanged in April after it increased 0.8 percent in March.  The broader Consumer Price Index  increased 0.2 percent in April.

New data out this morning offer continued clues that we are slinking out of the winter economic soft patch.

Economists at the San Francisco Fed, and the Federal Reserve Board’s own economists, are divided over whether first-quarter economic growth numbers present a true picture of the state of the economy, especially during a period of bad weather.