Happy Halloween, or as our Irish ancestors say, the festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in – we know the Irish can’t spell any better than the Scots, who write McVane as McVean). The festival marked the end of harvest, and the start of darker days when agricultural workers not only rose, but finished their day without light. Cattle were brought in from summer pasture – which typically meant families were reunited after a summer living apart, as younger men tended cattle in of

The Consumer Price index is the first piece of government data released during the government shutdown, as it was needed to calculate the annual adjustment to social security benefits (and other indexations, like IRS brackets). The widely followed CPI-U (for all urban consumers) rose 0.3%, to a 3.0% gain for the year – slightly lower than expectations of 0.4% and 3.1%. However, social security checks will rise by only 2.8%, as they are indexed to the annual change in the thir

We attended the National Association for Business Economics Annual Conference in Philadelphia this week – and our major take away was that despite a generally negative outlook on the macro picture, we did not find many economists who were worried about their particular industry (except housing). This is not unusual, and is part of the reason economics is called the dismal science. As we have often noted, economists are rarely hired to point the way toward growth – that is the