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163 articles
Articles
- PerspectiveIndustrial Policy
Regulation can change what an asset does; only ownership decides that it exists
Ownership gives a state two rights no rule confers: the decision that an asset exists, and the claim on whatever is left over once it does. What complicates the case is price, because the ten-year Treasury rate averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and a state that owns must raise the money before it decides anything.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
Two thirds of the M2 increase since 2020 arrived in a single year
The money stock is 4.26 trillion dollars larger than in 2020. Of that, 2.84 trillion came between 2020 and 2021, and the four years since have added half as much again, including the only contraction in the window.
- PerspectiveEconomic Security
Commodity dependence is an exposure in the budget, and the conversion that ends it runs slower than the price cycle
Texas raises more severance tax than any other state, 8.00 billion dollars, and that is 8.9 percent of what Texas collects; the same tax is 47.2 percent of North Dakota's. The exposure therefore sits in the size of the rest of the base, and the spending that would widen one moves slowly: factory construction rose for four years, then fell.
- PerspectiveStrategic Technology
Technical standards decide admission where a tariff only sets a price, and nothing in the record counts admission
Goods exports to mainland China fell from 13 billion dollars a month in 2022 to 9 in 2025, and imports from 45 to 26. The series record that both legs shrank and attribute the fall to nothing, which is why a rulebook written years earlier cannot be told apart from a duty imposed last quarter.
- DécryptageWorkforce & Skills
What makes an apprenticeship registered
Registration is a legal status granted by the Department of Labor or a recognised state agency, not a verdict on the quality of the training. By the end you will know what the sponsor has to promise, what the apprentice is owed, and what the credential is worth away from the firm that issued the work.
- DécryptageTrade & Investment
Why agricultural export values move when the harvest does not
An export figure is a price multiplied by a quantity, reported as a single number. Reading it as a measure of how much food left the country confuses the two, and this explains what it takes to tell them apart.
- PerspectiveIndustrial Policy
Institutional quality is several separable capacities, and the score that ranks them is mostly a choice of weights
Operationally the term names separable things: a task specified, a cost stated, a time stated, and a published record of whether the work was done. A composite removes the units before it adds them, and on this site's own state index the weightings a person could defend move one jurisdiction across thirty places.
- PerspectiveTariffs & Trade Agreements
A bilateral arrangement locks in a counterparty, which is the part of a trading position most likely to change
Goods imports from China fell from a monthly average of 45 billion dollars in 2022 to 26 in 2025, and exports to it from 13 to 9, while total imports and exports of goods and services each rose by 0.28 trillion dollars across the same three years. No series on this site describes an arrangement of either kind, so what each locks in is argued here and not measured.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What financial close means on an infrastructure project
Financial close is a single date on which every financing document signs and the lenders' money becomes a binding commitment. By the end you will know what has to be true on that day, how it differs from the announcements that come before it, and why it is the only one worth believing.
- CommentaireWorkforce & Skills
A national credential is built for a job market no state actually has
The Bureau's 2025 occupational file lists twelve local specialities for each of 51 jurisdictions, 612 rows holding 351 different occupations, and 204 of those appear on exactly one state's list. The same file records no credential at all, so an employer certificate would have to publish numbers a stranger can count before it could replace the system it criticises.
- PerspectiveIndustrial Policy
Industrial strategy is a decade-long commitment made by institutions that are not built to hold one
Spending on manufacturing plant rose from a yearly rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024, lifting the factory share of all nonresidential building from 8.8 percent to 18.8. Manufacturing employment reached its high for these six years in 2023 and is lower now, which is what it looks like when a country can order buildings faster than the institutions to run them.
- PerspectiveGovernance & Institutions
Reform of a multilateral institution changes behaviour only when it changes what the institution must count
Reform is argued as a question of votes and chairs, while behaviour is set by the balance sheet, the appropriation and the measure that decides eligibility. The statistics that would test any of it are national, and this site holds no comparable published series for the institutions themselves.
- DécryptageWorkforce & Skills
What a state unemployment rate leaves out
The rate is a fraction whose denominator moves. By the end you will know why it can fall while a state's workforce shrinks, and why it counts residents when payroll figures count jobs.
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
The policy rate has given back less than a fifth of its climb
On annual averages the federal funds rate rose 5.06 percentage points from its 2021 low to its 2024 peak, then fell 0.93. Everything priced against the policy rate is still being priced against most of the increase.
- ÉclairageInfrastructure
Each yearly fall in housing starts has been smaller than the one before it
The starts rate has declined in four consecutive observations, but the declines are shrinking: 0.05, then 0.13, then 0.05, then 0.01. The last of those is one unit in the final published digit, which means the series has stopped moving at a level below where it began in 2020.
- PerspectiveIndustrial Policy
Ten of fifty-one jurisdictions are concentrated in both production and engineering work, and the record cannot show a cluster forming in any of them
Twenty-five jurisdictions employ production workers more intensively than the nation and twenty-three do the same for architecture and engineering, but only ten do both. The rate at which people quit a job, which is the closest thing the record holds to the movement a cluster runs on, gave its lowest reading of the window in 2025.
- CommentaireHousing Supply
Federal policy cannot raise housing supply and should pay for authorisations instead
Idaho authorised 0.98 new private housing units per thousand residents in July 2026 and California 0.21, a ratio of 4.66, under the same federal tax code and the same policy rate. Idaho's house-price index has still multiplied 8.78 times since 1980 against California's 9.75, so authorising more has not by itself held appreciation down.
- PerspectiveStrategic Technology
Diffusion rather than invention is the binding step in technological change, and no series in the record counts it
Computer and electronic product output rose 21.1 index points between 2020 and 2025 while manufacturing output as a whole ended 2.7 points below its own 2017 base. Core capital-goods orders, the closest series in the record to the channel by which equipment reaches firms that do not make it, averaged 77 billion dollars a month in 2022 and the same in 2025.
- PerspectiveMacroeconomics & Markets
Two participation rates moved apart, and that gap is where ageing would enter the arithmetic
Headline participation gained 0.7 points between 2020 and 2025 while participation inside the 25-54 band gained 2.2, and the two rates divide by different populations. That gap is the shape an ageing population would take in a labour statistic, but none of these series counts anybody's age, so the shape is all it is.
- PerspectiveEconomic Security
A supply chain is governed on private books, and the public statistics reach only its edges
American business held an average of 2,663 billion dollars of inventory across 2025, 35.1 percent above 2020, and that buffer is the working instrument of resilience. The series records its size and nothing else: not who holds it, not against which supplier, not where the next tier sits.