Taking a quick break from the regularly scheduled programming to wish all of you a very happy and healthy holiday season. This will be the last digest of 2020 and it also marks two years of UnBenchd. I’m so incredibly thankful for all of you who have joined the journey, I hope it’s been as incredible for you as it has been for me. Here’s to a brighter, better, and, most importantly, healthier 2021 – cheers!  Santa’s cutting back  Retail sales fell 1.1% in November, which was a bigger drop than anticipated. Retail sales for October were revised downward to -0.1% vs the initial +0.3% reported. Sales were weaker across…

The wait has begun  It’s finally happening. Vaccinations have already begun in the UK. Delivery for the Pfizer vaccine is expected to begin across the US on Monday. Approval for Moderna’s vaccine is expected to come later this week. Despite that good news, we’re literally writing history with some of the deadliest days on record happening throughout this past week as COVID-19 deaths are surging.  Moral of the story: The NYTimes published an interactive tool that helps you “find your place in line” for a vaccine based on your age, occupation, health conditions, and location. There are 144.1m people ahead of me in line across the country, including 742k people ahead of me…

It’s not working anymore We added 245k jobs in November after adding 610k jobs in October and as many as 4.8m in June. The unemployment rate fell to 6.7%, though it’s more driven by people dropping out of the labor force all together (not a good thing). The number of workers that have been unemployed for more than six months (long-term unemployment) is sitting at 3.9m. These long-term unemployed workers represented 37% of all unemployed workers in November, which is up from just 19% in September, and compares to the historical peak in April 2010 of 45%. We’re still about 10m jobs short of pre-COVID levels, which is worse than the…