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Credit card usage by small US businesses nearly doubled in two years. Exploring how credit cards became crucial financing, with Federal Reserve rate hikes impacting growth and delinquencies, from Ufuk Akcigit, Raman Singh Chhina, Seyit M. Cilasun, jmirandal 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦, and Nicolas

Truly a Goldilocks #JobsReport 🏭 Stronger, broader job growth 💵 Solid real wage gains 🏪 More hours for production employees Just-right growth for workers and inflation-watchers.

So, erm, if I may... revised employment data are not being very kind to the employment effects of the 20$ minimum wage implemented in the fast-food industry in California in 2024.

Incredibly damning RAND report on the differences in the cost of building income-restricted, subsidized housing (statutory term: affordable), in TX vs CA. 1) CA projects take 22 months longer to build on avg than TX 2) Fees + taxes 29x higher in CA vs TX (12 vs CO).

Remember the 2024 $20 minimum wage hike for fast food workers from $16? Here’s how California fast-food restaurant prices have changed post-min wage hike versus fast-food prices in all other U.S. states in synthetic control and diff-in-diff setups (from forthcoming methods paper)

This The Hamilton Project interactive tool conveniently omits a line for 2023. Adding one shows a 10% increase in total federal outlays between 2023 and 2024 (from $6.13 trillion to $6.75 trillion). So the counterfactual is spending going up on autopilot, not staying flat.

Inflation is cool, and jobless claims are low and stable 🇺🇸

Why are the scenarios in the analysis foreign countries keeping their tariffs the same, or foreign countries raising their tariffs in retaliation? It now seems more likely that most of our trading partners will lower their tariffs and trade barriers to avoid our trade penalties.

Do they not realize that Social Security is already indexed to inflation? "The Democrats argue that the $200-a-month increase is necessary to shield beneficiaries from price increases stemming from Trump's tariff policies."

Jobless claims remain flat. dol.gov/ui/data.pdf

It's that time of the month: CPS-based quasi-JOLTS! 1/ Fujita, Moscarini and Postel-Vinay's employer-to-employer transition probabilities have been flat for about a year. I think of these as low-risk quits - you leave your current job and have another one lined up.