Interesting study on U.S. Metro economies (Pittsburgh, York: loan, employment)

[BrianTH]

I think we are going in circles, but I will remind you of what you noted yourself before: personal savings is just defined as disposable personal income minus personal outlays. Personal outlays does include service on debt and other financial obligations. But once you have accounted for personal savings and ALSO accounted for debt service and other financial obligations, you aren't left with any other way in which personal debt could be redirecting personal income away from personal consumption.

So if you have a theory about how something related to debt is actually reducing people's spending on other things, it has to show up in one of those two places (the personal savings rate or DSR/FOR). Otherwise, the theory must be wrong--not that something interesting might not be happening with some particular form of debt, but whatever that is isn't affecting the rate of personal spending on other things if it doesn't show up in one of those two places.

Anyway, this is a lot of work to try to deny the obvious: high unemployment is leading to stagnant wages which is leading to slow personal consumption growth. That mechanism doesn't depend on any story about debt, which is good because the numbers don't support such a story.

[Craziaskowboi]

Originally Posted by bradjl2009

So much for the fast recovery we've been talking about on here? Region did better in recession than it did during recovery

Government job losses.

[BrianTH]

Yeah, government is by far our weakest job category:

Pittsburgh, PA Economy at a Glance

Thank goodness we have such a low reliance on government jobs:

//www.city-data.com/forum/pitts...overnment.html

[Craziaskowboi]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Yeah, government is by far our weakest job category:

Pittsburgh, PA Economy at a Glance

Thank goodness we have such a low reliance on government jobs:

//www.city-data.com/forum/pitts...overnment.html

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the only job sectors with negative year-over-year growth in Pittsburgh are government, construction and information.

[BrianTH]

So there was a computer error and Pittsburgh actually ranks better in terms of recovery than initially reported:

Burgh Diaspora - Economic Development From Geographic Mobility

Key quote from an email by someone at Brookings to Burgh Diaspora:

Because of the error, which affected the rankings of a large number of metropolitan areas, Pittsburgh wasn't originally given sufficient credit for the relatively large decline in its unemployment rate during the recovery or the relatively small increase in the unemployment rate since the beginning of the recession. Pittsburgh's rankings, both overall and recovery, improved when the error was corrected.

[bradjl2009]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

So there was a computer error and Pittsburgh actually ranks better in terms of recovery than initially reported:

Burgh Diaspora - Economic Development From Geographic Mobility

Key quote from an email by someone at Brookings to Burgh Diaspora:

I woner if the Post-Gazette will report this or will Brookings redo their rankings?

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by bradjl2009

I woner if the Post-Gazette will report this or will Brookings redo their rankings?

According to the Burgh Diaspora post, Brookings has already revised their website.

I don't know what the PG will do (could be just one of those corrections that no one sees, but since it is someone else's error, maybe they will make it more prominent).

[BrianTH]

Another quarter, we're still chugging along. Overall page:

MetroMonitor Home Page - Metropolitan Policy Program - Brookings Institution

Writeup on Pittsburgh:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Fil...iles/38300.pdf

It still amazes me that we are doing better at this point after the Great Recession than we did at the same point after the Dot-Com Recession. It is also interesting to me that upstate New York is on a similar track, whereas Eastern Ohio is not.

[bradjl2009]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Another quarter, we're still chugging along. Overall page:

MetroMonitor Home Page - Metropolitan Policy Program - Brookings Institution

Writeup on Pittsburgh:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/Metro/metro_monitor/metro_profiles/2011_09_profiles/38300.pdf

It still amazes me that we are doing better at this point after the Great Recession than we did at the same point after the Dot-Com Recession. It is also interesting to me that upstate New York is on a similar track, whereas Eastern Ohio is not.

It seems to me that the Northeast and Texas are easily the two areas of the country that held their spot during the recession and are doing the best during the recovery. It's good to see that despite the slowing down of employment that Pittsburgh is still creating jobs year over year at a point where it has some of the strong growth in that sector too. Our wage growth was pretty strong also and I only counted 15 cities with higher wage growth than Pittsburgh so that would be another category we are in the strongest preforming for. I'd also want to point out that most cities in the Northeast and Midwest which are moving along in this recovery did very awful after the Dot-Com Recession and those areas which boomed (mostly in the South) on what we can essentially call today an "artificial economic boom and growth" period are still doing badly today and loss more than they gained from the first recovery.

[BrianTH]

Yep--right now, in retrospect "artificial" seems like the right word for the "recovery" from the Dot-Com Recession.