Economics Roundtable
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
November Payroll Employment
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
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Economics Unbound (Mike Mandel)
Here's a bit of a good news-bad news chart.
The rate of job cuts for production workers in manufacturing has slowed dramatically in the past few months, as companies start to rebuild inventories.
However, they are still aggressively slicing their nonproduction workers--engineers, managers, sales ...
Posting for Michael, who’s traveling:
If you care about R&D, product design, worker training, or any of that other good stuff, you might want to look at my new cover story. I’ll be adding to this over the weekend.
Ford's 3rd quarter earnings report, released this morning, showed a surprisingly large net income of almost $1 billion. The company reported that it:
...reduced its Automotive structural costs by $1 billion in the quarter, largely driven by lower manufacturing and engineering costs, which included benefits from improved productivity, personnel reduction ...
One of my favorite commenters, Ajay, writes:
Wow, when the chief economist at Businessweek is capable of writing a sentence like "if U.S.-based companies are doing their research and product development overseas and their production there as well, it's tough to see how ordinary workers in the U.S. will gain," it's ...
This morning Warren Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway announced that it was buying Burlington Northern Santa Fe in a deal valued at $44 billion. In the announcement, Buffett called the purchase an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States."
Is Buffett right that a bet on Burlington Northern is ...
I'm about to go down to DC to attend this conference (I'm giving the after-dinner remarks as well)
Measurement Issues Arising from the Growth of Globalization
This is a very important conference as we try to figure what is *really* going on in the U.S. economy. I'll be writing ...
In recent months, I've repeatedly made the point that the financial crisis was a symptom, not a cause. Innovation was weaker than expected, private sector job growth outside of healthcare was virtually nonexistent, while real wages and real stock values showed little gains from the late 1990s to the end ...
Over the next week, as I clean up my desk, I'm going to be doing short reviews of books that I have been meaning to write about. Let's start with Profit Power Economics, a fascinating new book which combines corporate strategy and economics. The author, Mia de Kuijper, runs her ...
Here's more bad news for jobs.
According to this morning's trade report, the advanced technology trade deficit widened to $18.2 billion in the third quarter, up from $12.9 billion in the second quarter of 2009 (advanced technology products include 10 categories, such as information and communications, biotechnology, and ...
...if anyone is interested.
Following my usual practice, I regret to inform you that I've reduced my investments in domestic equities. I think this play still has another unhappy act to run before the (perhaps) happy ending. But is there an intermission?