The Economy Is Finally Coming Through for U.S. Workers
Decent wage gains are showing up in paychecks. That should continue for a while.
Bloomberg, January 7, 2019.
Last week, I discussed the things I got wrong in 2018. Today, I want to point out one that I got very right: rising wages.
Saying that higher wages were coming wasn’t an especially popular viewpoint as recently as 2016 (see this and this). It was a little less radical to suggest that higher wages were on the way a year ago
After two years of workers seeing modestly bigger paychecks, it looks like we are now in that part of the business cycle when steady and large gains show up. More evidence for this could be found in the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday. Workers had an average gain in hourly wages of 3.2 percent in December, well above the average of 2.4 percent during the past five years, as the chart below shows. More gains probably are on the way . . . Continues here…
~~~
I originally published this at Bloomberg, January 7, 2019.. All of my Bloomberg columns can be found here and here.
