BLS announced usual weekly earnings for full-time workers today. It's a quarterly series, and the latest reading is for the first three months of 2023.
Compared to the previous quarter, men's earnings were down $7. Women were up $8. The combined total was up 81 cents.
Since the first quarter of 2020, men's earnings are down $51 and women's earnings are down $2. The combined total was down $12 (-1%). This, of course, means the economy is running too hot and we need to drag workers down even further.
NOTE: Just as a reminder, corporate profits were up $830 billion (+59%) over the same period.
If this statistic falls because higher income and middle class wage earners are falling behind, thats a problem.
If this statistic falls because the poors are getting jobs and dragging the median down, thats an entirely different problem with an entirely different solution.
The Fed is on this, dont worry.
Google paid 99 dollars an hour on the internet. Everything I did was basic Οnline w0rk from comfort at hΟme for 5-7 hours per day that I g0t from this office I f0und over the web and they paid me 100 dollars each hour. For more details
visit this article... https://createmaxwealth.blogspot.com
This is a legitimate concern. We should figure out hard how to get back to the pre-covid economy, where inflation was low and wages were rising.
Two quibbles, and a philosophical question:
* Why are you comparing to March of 2020 instead of December of 2019? It is obvious from the chart that the covid disruption had already begun by March 2020.
* The median wage is inherently a per-capita metric, while corporate profits are economy wide. Population growth has been low recently so this isn't a major distortion, but it is a bit apples-to-oranges (maybe grapefruit-to-oranges).
Philosophical question: if inflation were running at 10% and median wages were increasing at 9.9%, would that be a sign that the Fed should lower rates? Put it another way: is there a level of inflation that you find unacceptable? Or it any amount of inflation ok as long as wages keep up or grow faster?
Maybe you should overlay profits with inflation.