Our work speaks for itself, and here we’ve selected reports that cover a broad range of what we do. If you’d like to see how we did during stretches not included here, please contact us.
01/08/15
Jobs look solid: spiders spin an uneven tale
Arachnophobes beware.
Download TLR 01 08 2015
12/10/14
Wages strive to close the gaps
A look at real wages around the country since the trough. It helps, a lot, if you are sitting on valuable mineral resources. Maps included.
Download TLR 12 10 14
10/14/14
Fiscal drag; oil boost
Our oil call, and what it likely means.
Download TLR 10 14 2014
09/14/14
Work martyrs who can’t buy a house
Surprise: Housing boom/bust mostly about price. Afraid to take a vacation?
Download TLR 9 14 2014
03/12/14
Big freeze in sales tax receipts
“Really, when you look at this graph, you have to wonder how retail sales recovered from their recessionary depths.”<
Download TLR 3 12 2014
12/11/13
Sustainable improvement?
State revenue officials are encouraged by recent receipts. Is confusion giving way to, maybe, some confidence?
Download TLR 12 11 2013
07/31/2013
Waiting for the Jackson Hole research deluge
In 2012 the Jackson Hole meetings produced a slew of critical papers (see below). This year, researchers at the SF Fed cite weakness in wages of recent college grads, the “marginal workers” of the highly skilled, as evidence of continuing weakness in the job market.
Download TLR 07 31 2013
09/13/12
Incomes (& Fed policies?) take a beating
Research from former Fed officials and related academics sounds the alarm: QE can’t make a dent in the unemployment rate, and the FOMC has fewer options than members suggest.
Download TLR 09 13 2012
09/20/2011
The debtless recovery
Deleveraging continues, household balance sheets remain ragged, and corporate America: flush, tightfisted, eyes overseas.
Download TLR 09 20 2011
04/12/11
Crawling back to 2006, or 2004?
Animal dis-spirits: there isn’t a lot of new business formation out there. And please ignore those rumors about a big upward benchmark revision to payrolls. (Rumor? +500K; Reality? -378K.)
Download TLR 04 12 2011
01/13/2009
Sales tax receipts miss lowered forecasts, again
Things do not look good in revenue world. MEW goes negative, and Prof. Curtin, who heads up the UMich Consumer Confidence series, outlines the 5 degrees of discontent. Can’t we just keep it at 4?
Download TLR 01 13 2009
01/08/09
The news will keep getting worse
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s now classic, then new, study of international financial crises was not yet on the national radar screen, but it was on ours. We lay out their findings, and what we believed lay ahead for us, unfortunately we were right on the money.
Download TLR 01 08 2009
04/03/08
Tough love, Swedish style
News that the Fed is studying how Nordic countries handled their early-1990s banking crises cheered the markets, but the enthusiastic bidders must not
have been paying attention to the details. Sweden took a successful and painful stand, which included raising overnight rates 500% to defend the krona.
Can you imagine the Feds raising rates a relatively modest 10% in the current environment?
Download TLR_04_03_08
03/12/08
Can you say, “Housing, gas, and food prices?”
Or, stagflation hits the hotdog.
Download TLR 03 12 2008
01/14/08
Dimmed lights and a giant Grinch
A holiday season only Dr. Seuss’s infamous character could love: electricity prices keeping Christmas lights in storage, mall vacancies at 11-year highs, phones
disconnected over unpaid bills, our recession index moving into full alarm mode, and a giant inflatable Grinch replacing the usual riot of Christmas lights in rural
New York.
Download TLR_01_14_08
01/03/08
Can exports save us from a recession?
We’ve been hearing a lot of talk about how we can export our way out of this mess, but a look at historical trends doesn’t support that view. State revenue estimators “take the ax” to their forecasts. Oh, and, December
saw a nasty spike in our recession index.
Download TLR_01_03_08
12/12/07
The Italians are coming…to buy Prada!
This is one mighty unusual weak-dollar environment. It’s all about tourists coming here to flex their currencies, which means our manufacturers aren’t getting
much of a boost, and, perhaps oddest of all, challenged Upstate New York is once again BJ’s strongest sales region. But all that shopping isn’t enough to offset
domestic weakness; use this link to read what out tax contacts are saying about sagging sales tax receipts.
Download TLR_12_12_07
10/11/07
Could it be a recession?
Famous last words! With sales tax receipts plunging, we outline evidence that we are at the edge of a recession.<
Download TLR 10 11 2007
07/05/07
Sittin’ on the dock:
We wrote this report cataloguing the burgeoning costs of our fraying infrastructure, including both the crumbling rocks and gravel and the rusting research edge,
on the Fourth of July as a patriotic plea. Click here to find out why research in "emergent phenomena" is crucial to our maintaining a leading role in the world scientific community.
Download TLR_07_05_07
05/10/06
Edgy debtors and a history book
Although Yale Economist Robert Schiller didn’t utter the words "irrational exuberance," they did summarize his message to the then Fed chair on the day before the latter coined the phrase. We wrote this report to make sure our readers knew what Dr. Schiller had dug up recently on real estate prices: There’s no real uptrend in housing prices over the last century, and the then-current boom was a real anomaly.
Download TLR051006
