By Christopher Briem, on November 1st, 2012
I tend to forget the state stuff, but I should have noticed this. Pennsylvania hit a new all-time labor force peak with the September data that came out a couple weeks ago.
Link: Data and chart from BLS.
Specifically the PA labor force is showing over 6.5 million for the first time ever. Topping a peak of 6.482 million hit in November of 2008.
Must not mean anything since nobody notices such things. Yet this really matters in ways you may not realize. It turns out that a big chunk of the official budget projections calculated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are crucally dependent on what is projected to happen with labor force participation rates (see last slide). Seriously.. it works out that lower LFP = bad for state revenue projections, higher LFP = higher revenue projections.
It’s funny anticipating how much angst there will be debating the state budget, but virtually no notice of the numbers that will actually shape that debate up front. The way it works in Pennsylvania is that it all starts with the revenue projections. One could argue that it ends there as well.
By Christopher Briem, on October 26th, 2012
So maybe I need to get into a daily digit type of routine. Of late there is a round of news around the state how municipalities are going to use their shale gas impact fee windfall. Here is the Inky’s version: PA towns savor drilling impact-fee checks.
How much of a windfall is it? According to the news, a total of $204 million is being distributed to local governments across the commonwealth. A big number yes?
For perspective the revenue for local governments alone across Pennsylvania amounted to $63 billion in 2010 alone. So the ratio of the new windfall to that revenue base gives me……..
update: I overestimated. So only 60% of the 204 million goes to local governments. So it is $122 million being distributed to local governments. The ratio works out to be: 0.19%.
If you really want to play with numbers, that $ amount is equivalent to the fines from just 10 red light cameras like this one in DC.
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By Christopher Briem, on October 24th, 2012
No time to parse, but some might want to see the latest promo piece (too long to be advertisement… certainly not a documentary so I am not sure what to classify it as) from the MSC folks on all things Natural Gas in Pennsylvania.
If I were to parse a bit I would start with the repeated story I heard in there again that shale gas development is creating some new boom in manufacturing employment in Pennsylvania. Maybe in the future, but if someone wants to look at the recent trends in manufacturing employment in either Pennsylvania or even just the Pittsburgh MSA I just don’t see how you can say it yet.. It clearly is usually stated in the present perfect continuous. That certainly is how people are taking it and a repeated conversation I will get into will be with folks who believe manufacturing employment in Pennsylvania is not just up, but up a lot in recent years because of shale gas related developments. Actually if you check the previous links the the manufacturing employment in both Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh took pretty sizable hits just in the September data just out which is a story unto itself and there has not any palpable growth in years.
and Good Morning Wiz.
By Christopher Briem, on September 21st, 2012
So just an update on the latest data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Health Insurance Estimates program which put out 2010 data last month. noted last year was that for 2009 the estimated health insurance coverage for children (under age 18) population was higher than any county in Pennsylvania.
So with 2010 data that is still the case. At 3.7% of children uninsured by my quick scan it looks to me to be one of the lowest uninsured rate for large county in the US. Honolulu, Hawaii, DuPage county in Illinois, Hartford and New Haven in CT and Middlesex County, MA are all a bit lower, but that is it.
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By Christopher Briem, on August 31st, 2012
So I am really missing something here. Why is there not someone out there noticing a big no brainer opportunity and investing themselves in the infrastructure needed to sell shale gas to local utilities?
See Trib today: Equitable’s plan to use more local gas is challenged
There is a deeper story embedded in all of that. What does this really say about the ability of drilled shale gas in Pennsylvania to make it to market? The story is pretty much saying somebody thinks there is a market failure occurring: Gas being developed that can’t even make it to the most local of markets without a regulated subsidy to make it happen. “To market, to market……” as the saying goes.
Speaking of markets doing as they ought to. PG points out the plunging price of ethane: Drillers rattled as ethane, propane prices plunge. Funny how that works. Big new supply. Lower prices. If I read the news correctly the big new supply of ‘wet’ gas in nearby Ohio is only beginning to flow so this trend will continue yes?
To keep sight of the big picture. It’s all about the storage capacity of natural gas in the US. There are pundits for every position, but a compilation of a lot of the relevant stats are here. It really all comes down to the winter weather. Gas producers may rejoice that the Farmers Almanac at least says the eastern US will be colder this winter compared to last.
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By Christopher Briem, on August 28th, 2012
This week EIA hightlights this look at how natural gas development has changed in Pennsylania over the last 7 years.
By Christopher Briem, on August 27th, 2012
So here is an issue a lot of us have been kvetching about for a long time. Bloomberg has this today on the vast unknown of how all the thousands of municipal pension funds in Pennsylvania spend to administer their pension plans: Pennsylvania Pays Pension Penalty as Bond Costs Climb. It may be the single biggest black hole in Pennsylvania public finance. and the administration costs probably are just the part of the iceberg you can see. Nobody really can tell you whether the investments all those micro-plans are making really make sense. Even the big plans that have lots of eyes on them do some really bizarre things that lose $millions. Imagine what we don’t know about the investment decisions of the other 3,000 or so pension plans in Pennsylvania. Locally I can’t read the pension news any longer since it all makes so little sense to me. Today: City Pension Board Rejects Studying ‘Realistic’ Returns. Pension doing well, pension doing poorly? Who knows really? The latest update on the status of the Pittsburgh pension fund is that it’s funding ratio went down by 1.7%. OK what does that mean?
The numbers mean very little. Skipping the long story, the pension ‘fund’ includes in its valuation a notional asset made up of a semi-codified promise of future parking tax revenue. It is said the promise of future revenues have increased the funding ratio of the pension fund by 29%. We will skip the fact that law and contracts all effectively mean that the city has promised to pay the pension fund anyway. If the promise gets to be valued as an asset, then there isn’t any real need to be quantifying how funded the system is in the first place OK, that is almost philosophical. Skip the big picture question, but the real question is how well funded is Pittsburgh’s pension system?
So think about it. If the pension fund had zero liquid or semi-liquid assets then it would still have this promise of future payments that kind of exists no matter. If there were no liquid assets then you can’t spend the future promise of payments unless you borrow against them. So if consistent with the regular reporting on this, the official calculation would be that the pension fund would be funded at a 29% funding ratio. No cash to send out checks, but no matter. In other words 29 is the new zero.
So even if the news is minimal, the issue won’t go away even if the city wants it to. For the microscopic % out there who might be able to read this past the paywall, but Bondbuyer recently covered us: Pittsburgh Wants toEnd Oversight, But Pensions Present Problems. PBT earlier in the month if you missed it: Pittsburgh’s pension-fund projections met with skepticism
and as mentioned here in the past.. there are some more interesting things coming down the road with regards to public pension accounting nationally.
By Christopher Briem, on August 24th, 2012
Let’s stick with the state theme for now. So there is a lot of news today about the state of manufacturing in Pennsylvania. Seems like some of that might be slightly interested in what we know about past trends. Here is that trend data in manufacturing employment put in terms of a percentage of total employment.
What do I see? Basically a long term trend with brief acceleration in 2008-2009 as the recession impacts got the trend ahead of itself. Since then we have basically been within an insignificant digit bouncing around the all time low of just below 10% of the total jobs in the state coming from manufacturing. Incredibly flat as these things go over the last several years. Barely a blip up or down… flattest it has ever been in a sense.
The comparable number for the Pittsburgh region you ask? 7.66%.
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By Christopher Briem, on August 22nd, 2012
Speaking of data produced in Harrisburg, last week was the monthly dump of labor force data for the state. All bad, right? Let’s go beyond the headline and look at national data to do some simple benchmarking to see how Pennsylvania did compared to other states. I’ll only pose one question with this which is: other than recent history, how far would you have to go back for Pennsylvania to come out near the top in this metric? I don’t actually know the answer to that btw… and am too lazy to figure it out right now.
But lets take out the District of Columbia out just for argument’s sake. In this state data the District of Columbia means the district itself. So not even the metro region there on the other side of the Appalachians, but just the city proper of roughly 618K people. Looking just at states the same data looks like this:
Note things not faring well in Hawaii. Still you think someone in the greater public infosphere might take note that it is Pennsylvania with the fastest growing labor force in the nation. Maybe too much cognitive dissonance in that to report on it. If I could do that thing Mr. Spock did with his eyebrow…….
By Christopher Briem, on August 20th, 2012
So just to go beyond the headlines a bit looking at some recent news on the state’s unemployment rate for July. Headline is the unemployment rate ticked up 3/10th’s of a percent which is not good. Yet at the same time the labor force increased and is just a blip below its all time high that came in November 2008 before the recession impacts kicked into the labor force stats.
That is for the state Along with the state data the local data on total nonfarm jobs came out as well. That data showed a decrease in 7,900 jobs for the region between June and July. Puts us now below the all time employment peak reached last month, but it is the highest job count for a July ever. And yes for those who dispute it, those ‘all time’ declaratives include the job counts before the steel jobs dropped.
But looking just at the change from June to July. A decline. Bad? Must be bad right?
Maybe not. Between June and July the job count in the region always falls mostly as a result of cyclical fluctuations and the end of the school year for many. So if you go look at how much of a drop is normal this time of year I get this.
So let’s sum up. June total nonfarm jobs for the Pittsburgh MSA were the highest ever recorded. The drop between June and July is the lowest comparable monthly drop in more than two decades. What’s that all give you?
Well in June the total job count of 1.175 million was just 3,000 over where it was at in that June 2001 bubble going on locally. Not a big delta other than for the symbolism. For last month (July) the total job count 1.167 million was 13,000 over the next highest June which was also in 2001. Trend? and if you ask me what is most interesting to watch is that these all time highs are being reached despite construction employment in the region being at some of its lowest comparable levels in years. Those missing 5-10K jobs would make those new highs look awfully different if we could add them in.
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