Top Posts of 2024 on Our Economics Blogs

In 2021, readers of two of our economics blogs were most interested in inflation and COVID-19’s effects on the economy. The next year, they particularly sought out blog posts that explained various aspects of financial markets and Fed monetary policy. In 2023, posts on inflation trends, wage growth and the impact of rising interest rates were among the most popular.

So what did our audiences most want to learn about in 2024?

For the fourth year of reviewing our readers’ favorites, we looked at the top posts published in 2024 on our On the Economy blog, which offers frequent analysis and data from our economists and other St. Louis Fed experts, and Open Vault blog, which explains everyday economics and the Fed.

And this time we also took a look at the top posts on the FRED Blog, which features graphs and interesting data from online economic database FRED with brief explanations.

The results of our review? The topics of household finances and wealth, inflation and consumers, the labor market, and trade registered with audiences this year.

Read on for some of the most popular posts on each of the three blogs, grouped by topic. (Results are based on pageviews from Jan. 1 through Nov. 30 for posts published in 2024.)

Household Finances and Wealth

U.S. Wealth Inequality: Gaps Remain Despite Widespread Wealth Gains

Ana Hernández Kent and Lowell R. Ricketts, both with the Community Development Research team, examined U.S. household wealth using data from the 2022 release of the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

A Feb. 7 Open Vault post outlined their findings, including:

• Black, Hispanic and high school grad families saw wealth gains starting in 2016 and continuing through 2022, but wide gaps with higher wealth groups remained.
• The families in the top 10% of the wealth distribution owned almost three-quarters of the U.S. household wealth pie in 2022. The families in the bottom half of the wealth distribution had 2% of that pie, as can be seen in the animated infographic.

The Broad, Continuing Rise in U.S. Credit Card Debt Delinquency

A popular On the Economy blog post published May 14 looked at a different aspect of household finances: credit card debt delinquency.

Juan M. Sánchez and Masataka Mori showed that U.S. credit card delinquency was rising, both in terms of the percentage of people late on their payments and the share of debt that’s past due.

The delinquency rate “is an important statistic because it describes the share of the population that is struggling to repay its debt,” wrote Sánchez, an economist, and Mori, a research associate.

Comparing household assets across the wealth distribution

An April 4 FRED Blog post also looked at U.S. households’ wealth, using the Board’s Distributional Financial Accounts data. The post, which was suggested by economist Miguel Faria-e-Castro and then-research associate Samuel Jordan-Wood, outlined the value and types of assets held by households in various wealth brackets.

Among the data highlighted: Nonfinancial assets like homes and vehicles made up an average of about 70% of the assets of the least wealthy. In contrast, financial assets like stocks made up the majority of wealthier groups’ assets.

Households and Inflation

Household net worth, “excess savings,” and inflation since the pandemic

A Feb. 12 FRED Blog post also partially focused on household finances, in the form of savings as measured using household net worth. Suggested by Sanchez and Mori, the post looked at the relationship between U.S. households’ savings and a measure of personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation. The post showed a close connection in recent years, as seen in the FRED graph below.

How the Big Mac Index Relates to Overall Consumer Inflation

The McDonald’s Big Mac is the same in every country, and the idea behind the Big Mac index created by The Economist magazine is that the hamburger’s price should reflect local prices for expenses like ingredients and wages, according to an April 11 On the Economy blog post by economist B. Ravikumar and then-research associate Amy Smaldone.

The index is used “to roughly gauge the relative strength of foreign exchange rates,” the authors wrote. To gauge whether the index also reflects a country’s inflationary pressures, they compared the Big Mac index for the U.S. with the U.S. consumer price index (CPI). The authors said, “Though Big Mac inflation does seem to track CPI inflation, its path can diverge from overall inflation because of price deviations relative to other goods and services in the U.S. consumer basket.”

The U.S. Labor Market

The job openings-to-unemployment ratio: Labor markets are in better balance

The FRED Blog post published on July 18 highlighted how U.S. labor market tightness—as measured by the job openings-to-unemployment ratio—had declined from its March 2022 peak. At that time, there were two job openings per unemployed person, the post said. In May 2024, that ratio was down to 1.2, as it had been before the pandemic. The post was suggested by economist Charles Gascon and research associate Joseph Martorana.

The History of the U.S. White-Black Wage Gap from 1969 to Now

How much has widespread economic growth during business cycle peaks helped shrink the wage gap between Black and white Americans? A Jan. 17 Open Vault post by economist William Rodgers III examined data for 2022 and for years corresponding to business cycle peaks going back to 1969 to answer that question.

Rodgers’ conclusion: “Even in the tight labor market period that started March 2022, sustained low unemployment has had a limited effect on the white-Black wage gap.”

Other Topics

Commercial Real Estate in Focus

An On the Economy post focused on the challenges facing commercial real estate. The May 30 post, by business economist Kathleen Navin, examined the size and structure of the U.S. commercial real estate market and looked at headwinds such as those from higher interest rates. She also discussed rising vacancy rates, which were particularly high for office space, as the graph below shows.

Vacancy Rates for Commercial Real Estate Properties

SOURCE: CBRE Group.

NOTES: The availability rate is shown for the retail sector as data on the retail vacancy rate are unavailable. Shaded areas indicate quarters that experienced a recession. Data are from the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2024.

Why Countries Trade: A Look at Benefits and Risks

The expansion of global trade over time suggests that there are recognized benefits of trade, but there are also risks that have come into more focus in recent years, including during the pandemic, as have terms like “decoupling,” “reshoring” and “friendshoring.”

For the March 6 Open Vault post, author Kristie Engemann consulted economist Fernando Leibovici about those benefits and risks. The post also detailed discussion by Leibovici about some potential ways for countries to mitigate the risks, which is where terms like “friendshoring” come in—friendshoring means increasing trade with countries that are trusted trading partners.