Although California’s official unemployment rate climbed out of the cellar during the year that ended June 30, it still had the nation’s second highest rate of total “labor underutilization,” according to a new federal government report.
Although its overall population growth continues to slow, California’s senior population – those 65 and older – will nearly double in the next 15 years, a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California concludes.
The price index for personal-consumption expenditures, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, rose 0.2% in June from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said. From a year earlier, prices were up just 0.3%.
The U.S. economy accelerated modestly in the second quarter after a slow start to 2015, but growth this year is still less than last year’s tepid first half and is well below the overall pace of the recovery.
Sales rose from a year earlier for the fourth straight month to an estimated 46,095 homes despite unusually tight supplies. It marked an increase of 10.8 percent from 41,612 sales in May and 16.8 percent from 39,460 sales a year earlier.
In 1987, during the last period of productivity hand-wringing, Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow quipped: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
U. S. consumer prices rose in June—and for the first time in 2015 this broad measure of inflation is in positive territory when compared with a year ago.
California reported an increase in new claims of 2,930. The state attributed the change to layoffs in the service industry.
For the first time in more than a decade, overall crime is up in Los Angeles through the first six months of the year, rising by about 12%, according to a Times analysis..
Amid increasing economic turmoil in key overseas markets, California export trade edged down only 0.7 percent in May compared with the same month in 2014, according to an analysis of U.S. Commerce Department figures.
Just last month, new figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis appeared to reaffirm the state’s seventh place standing. But on Wednesday, revised estimates from the World Bank showed that Brazil had in fact ticked upward and pushed closer to the front of the line.
The Wall Street ratings agency Standard & Poor’s gave a vote of confidence to California’s finances on Thursday, upgrading its credit rating to its highest level in 14 years.
The latest figures for 2014 from the World Bank show that Brazil claimed seventh place with a gross domestic product of $2.346 trillion. California’s gross state product, which is comparable to GDP, was $2.312 trillion, according to a report released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
California reported an increase in new claims of 2,185. The state did not offer a reason for the change.
Merced County’s increase of 2,200 manufacturing jobs from January 2014 to January 2015 was 26.2 percent, far outstripping second-place Danville’s [IL] 14.9 percent.