Each quarter the Lowe Institute partners with Chapman University to produce consumer sentiment indices for three nearby metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire. The fourth quarter results—based on surveys conducted in mid-December—are in. You may recall it was a rather eventful quarter headlined by a precipitous stock market decline and a
The Department of Defense’s new policy to kick out non-deployable military members would seem to threaten California’s impressively low 4.1 percent unemployment rate which, according to the California Employment Development Department, reached a 42-year low in September. The DoD enacted their “deploy or get out” policy on October 1st, with the intention of creating a
We are currently enjoying the second longest expansion since the end of WW II and the national unemployment rate, standing at 3.7% for October, is at a 49-year low. So why do so many professional economists believe the expansion is likely to end soon? According to a Wall Street Journal survey conducted in May, almost
