The latest inflation snapshot has the head of Wisconsin’s largest business group talking about energy policy.
Kurt Bauer, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce president and CEO, on Wednesday said the latest numbers show the Producer Price Index is up almost 11% year-over-year. He said that’s not sustainable for manufacturers and producers in Wisconsin.
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While rank-and-file union members embraced President Trump, virtually every major union endorsed Joe Biden. A quietly issued Labor Department regulation helps explain this disconnect. President Biden has put union leaders first — even at the expense of union members.
Late last year, the Labor Department rescinded Trump Administration union transparency regulations. These regulations would have required union trust funds — like apprenticeship funds and strike funds — to disclose their receipts and expenditures.
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Wholesale prices in March increased by 11.2%, compared to 12 months earlier, the Labor Department said Wednesday.
The report also show the prices increased 1.1% from February to March.
The newly released numbers follow the agency saying Tuesday the price of consumer goods in March increased by 8.5%, compared to the same time last year, making the Consumer Price Index’s so-called “annualized rate” the highest since December 1981.
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Mandy Van Gorp was confident that her employer of 18 years, Eli Lilly and Company, would treat her fairly when she objected to its company-wide COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The pharmaceutical giant had promised to exempt employees with valid health or religious objections to the policy and she believed she had had both.
Despite presenting a doctor’s note in support of her exemption, citing an auto-immune disease, the company denied her request for a medical exemption. To add injury to the insult she felt, she tested positive for COVID-19 the day after receiving her rejection letter. She then appealed for a six-month deferral on grounds of the positive test. Lilly also denied that request. When she then raised her religious concerns, Lilly said she had missed the application deadline – a deadline that had lapsed several weeks before Lilly replied to her initial accommodation request.
The “toughest night was when we were sitting at the dinner table and my 12-year-old was sobbing, hysterically begging me to get the vaccine so I could keep my job,” recalled Van Gorp, a 42-year-old sales representative and mother of three. “I had to explain that my choice was not about money and that I felt God was leading me not to follow a mandate. It’s hard to explain that to a 12-year-old.”
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The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims increased to 248,000 in the week ending Feb. 12, the Labor Department announced Thursday.
The Labor Department’s figure showed an increase of 23,000 compared to the week ending on Feb. 5, when claims decreased to 225,000.
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The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims totaled 205,000 in the week ending Dec. 18, a new post-pandemic low.
The Labor Department figure shows an unchanged amount of claims from the previous week ending Dec. 11. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimated that claims would remain around last week’s reported level of 206,000, just above the lowest number in 52 years.
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The Labor Department’s official unemployment rate—the most well-known gauge of the labor market’s health—counts as unemployed only those who aren’t working but are actively seeking a job.
Yet there is very little that we can infer from the jobless rate about the health of the economy. The unavoidable conclusion is that the only reason investors follow the calculation is because both Washington’s politicians and the Federal Reserve are expected to react to it.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims decreased to 411,000 last week as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented a decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending June 12, when 418,000 new jobless claims were reported. That number was revised up from the 412,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
Economists expected Thursday’s jobless claims number to come in around 380,000, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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Relative to the national trend, job searches temporarily increased in states that have announced they will no longer offer the pandemic-related federal unemployment boost, an economic report showed.
In states that are withdrawing from the federal unemployment program, interest in job postings increased 5%, according to the report released Thursday by job listings site Indeed. The increase was relative to a national average recorded during the final two weeks of April, before Republican governors began canceling the federal benefit.
“In May, job search activity on Indeed increased, relative to the national trend, in states that announced they would end federal [unemployment] benefits prematurely,” the Indeed report said.
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The Department of Labor reinstated a political appointee Wednesday night who resigned under pressure after a Bloomberg Law reporter accused him of anti-Semitism for a Facebook post in which he was actually condemning anti-Semites in the alt-right, the Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively learned.
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