Personal saving surges to over $6T once again. Guess we all stopped going to restaurants?

 Here we go again. Personal saving surged to $6.04 trillion in March. I'm just waiting now for Neel Kashkari to come out and explain that it's because we didn't go to movie theaters and restaurants. (Hey, Neel, restaurants are open and people are spending again. Check retail sales.)

Actually, Neel's an idiot. (Seems to be a requirement to work at the Fed.) The reason for the surge in personal savings was due to those stimulus checks and other fiscal support. It works.

By the way, one byproduct of this has been a precipitous slowdown in the growth of bank loans. Not surprising. When the government supplies cash to people their need for bank credit goes down. Poor banks. Fewer customers begging for their credit. That means less fees and interest payments.

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa — Fed rebel warns businesses to stop 'whining' about a shortage of workers

It’s an all-too common refrain among US corporations: we have jobs available, but simply can’t find qualified workers to fill them.

Economists, including top Federal Reserve officials, lend credibility to this dubious claim by arguing there is a "skills gap" among US workers that is preventing firms from finding employees with the right backgrounds.

However, ample research and basic common sense suggests that wage stagnation, which has dominated the US job landscape in recent decades, is a symptom of an anemic labor market, not a fully recovered one.

Credit to Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari for pointing that out during a speech to business leaders on Monday.

"If you're not raising wages, then it just sounds like whining," he told a group of business people at a Rotary Club meeting in Sioux Falls, S.D., according to the Washington Examiner.

Business insider
Fed rebel warns businesses to stop 'whining' about a shortage of workers
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

ht Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality
 

Michael Finnegan And Seema Mehta — Analysis: Kashkari struggles to hit partisan balance in debate with California

Brown and Kashari are both positioned as fiscal conservatives and social liberals, which reflects the preference of California voters, the majority of whom are socially liberal but hate the state's high taxes — "the California premium."

It's an uphill fight for Kashari, who is an outlier in today's GOP, but he will get a lot of campaign cash from Silicon Valley.

McClatchy
Analysis: Kashkari struggles to hit partisan balance in debate with California Gov. Brown
Michael Finnegan And Seema Mehta

Pimco's equity strategist, Neel Kashkari, wants to leverage the firm's "macoreconomic ability"

Remember Neel Kashkari? He was Hank Paulson's "right hand boy" running the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Well, he was hired by Pimco to run their fledgling equities division, where he says...

You're not going to see us launch some plain, old U.S. large cap fund or just tell people to go buy the S&P 500 500," he revealed to the paper. Instead, the Pimco products will leverage the firm's abilities in currenices and macroeconomics to remiove volatility from portfolios based on well-researched stock picking.

That awesome macroeconomic ability sure helped Bill Gross figure out the Treasury market earlier this year, didn't it? Remember their brilliant short bet and "who's gonna buy them now?"

I can't wait to see the performance of Kashkari's portfolio. His current macro view is that interest rates "can't go lower." I guess we can infer from that comment that he means stocks can only go up? Maybe someone should send him a chart of the Nikkei.

Another Goldman "genius" unleashed.