Labor

After last Friday's disastrous jobs report and concurrent prior revisions, few were expecting any remarkable developments from "Yellen's favorite labor market indicator", the BLS' JOLTS, or Jobs Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and yet there were two surprises.

First, when it comes to actual job openings, the number rose from a downward revised 5.675MM to 5.788MM, which meant the job opening rate remained flat at 3.9%, even if the actual number of job opening just matched the all time high of last July.

We have covered the complete disaster that is Obamacare in great detail recently, from premiums skyrocketing in 2017, to the largest US Health Insurer throwing in the towel on Obamacare exchanges, and even Insurance companies suing the government over subsidies the government promised if the firms lost money as a result of being in the exchange.

Across the United States, some residents have to pay far more state and local tax than others. The amount you pay depends heavily on the state you reside in with New Yorkers suffering under the heaviest tax burden according to website Wallethub.

As Statista details,  the tax burden measures the percentage of a person’s income which goes towards state and local tax, different to the tax rate, which depends heavily on income and personal circumstances.

When it comes to fake data, China is in a class of its own: between fabricated export and import numbers (where hundreds of billion in capital flight are hidden), to massaged, goalseeked GDP "data", Chinese economic reporting has become a laughing stock across the developed world. Just last night, we showed a Goldman analysis according to which China was also misrepresenting its broadest credit aggregate, Total Social Financing, by hundreds of billions if not more as it was not accounting for shadow banking flows that did not end up in the economy.

Giving people free money might be the only solution when robots finally take our jobs According to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the British Labour is considering the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) in response to the increasing robotization of the workforce.