Cleaning up the Desktop

Instead of just moving files off my desktop, I decided to look at a few of them. That slowed things down. But I did get a blog post out of it.

Peak Interest Costs

 

Looking at that one, of course I wanted to see also the continuation of the 1960-1972 trend:

Just Looking

 

M1 money: 

Big increase in 2020

Some terms were redefined.  Savings was excluded from M1 before the change, and is now included.

This next one goes back to mine of 13 April, Answering an old question:

A price increase in 1950, let's say related to the Korean war. Then some remarkable price stability.
Then a price increase that begins in the second half of the massive 1955 increase in the Labor Force,
as adding all that unskilled labor led to falling productivity and rising business costs.

 

Looking at that graph, and now being more familiar with this data

• price per unit
• labor cost per unit
  
• nonlabor cost per unit and
• profit per unit,
  

I jumped to look at labor cost per unit as a percent of price per unit:

Unit Labor Cost as a percent of Unit Price of NCB output, 1950-1962

The drop in labor cost that was inspired by the 1954 recession ends in Q1 1955. The four dots there indicate the four quarters of 1955. The labor costs of nonfinancial corporate business ran low in 1955, and only started picking up in 1956: The increase of Q3 1955 is more like noise than an increase. (Compare it to the first increase after the low point of Q4 1950, or the first increase after the low of Q2 1959.) And from Q1 1956 to the 1958 recession is less than a one percentage point increase.

I think it is reasonable to say that in 1955-56, prices started going up before labor costs. Therefore, I have to say it was not wage-push inflation that drove prices up.

 

Price per unit is typically highest of the four data values, with labor the highest cost, then non-labor cost, and profits the lowest number of the four. But if you look at them on a graph, you just see four somewhat wiggly lines running across the page. So I indexed the four data sets to make them all the same value where they start, in 1947-01-01. Now we can see how they move, relative to each other:

Relative Movement of Unit Labor Cost (blue), Unit Non-Labor Cost (red),
Unit Price (green) and Unit Profits (purple)

With everything indexed and starting out equal in early 1947, profit (purple) is clearly the most variable of the numbers. The labor cost number runs almost unfailingly lower than everything else. That is due to the indexing; but the graph does show less variability in labor than in non-labor cost, and certainly less than in profits. And it is easy to see that non-labor cost increased faster than labor cost.

Note also that purple profits drop to low points when the red and blue costs reach highs. Based on this observation, we might think that at start-of-data, where profits are at a definite low point, labor and non-labor costs were already at high points that we cannot see due to the indexing -- and because no earlier data is available.

Well this is way more fun than just moving files off my desktop!