Finance

Finance Docket: A Personal Favorite Economic Indicator

By this measure, the strong economy isn't going away anytime soon.

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finance-docket-800Ed. note: This article first appeared in this week’s Finance Docket newsletter. Enter your email below to view the full newsletter and subscribe. 

The labor market closed out 2023 with yet another surprise: The December jobs report showed an addition of 216,000 positions, with unemployment holding steady at 3.7 percent. This blew past economists’ expectations. The consensus had been that the U.S. would add only 170,000 jobs to end the year.

Over all of 2023, the U.S. economy added close to 2.7 million jobs. This makes 2023 one of the most robust years for job gains so far in the new millennium.

Not surprisingly, given the ongoing resiliency in the labor market, the stock market got off to a sluggish start for 2024. Many traders have been pricing in expected rate cuts from the Fed in 2024. Yet, with the labor market holding strong, there is no particular urgency for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates from their current highs.

Although no observer of the financial world can discount the importance of the jobs numbers or the stock ticker, I do have a personal favorite economic indicator, namely, how much money it seems that people are willing to pointlessly throw away on dumb stuff. By that measure, the strong economy isn’t going away anytime soon. This month’s craze was Stanley brand insulated water tumblers released in several new pink and reddish colors.

Already overpriced when retailing at $45 apiece, these fancy stainless steel water bottles are popping up on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars. Crazed shoppers reportedly stood in long lines, waited overnight, and even physically battled other Stanley enthusiasts to get their hands on these handled, fairly ordinary-looking drinking apparatuses.

As with many aspects of our rapidly degenerating culture, it seems we have TikTok virality to thank for the Stanley cup trend. Social media users eagerly showed off their collections of multiple Stanley tumblers identical in all but color, each a perfect match for a different planned-in-advance outfit. Welcome to hypercapitalism, 2024 edition, ladies and gentlemen.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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