Economics Roundtable
Calculated Risk
Read the Bill McBride interview.
Jobs
The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
June Payroll Employment
The slowndown in employment growth over the past few months is starting to become more apparent in the graph below.
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Focus on the Problem
U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million jobs in February 2001. For April 2012, U.S. payroll employment had reached 133.0 million jobs, marking the third month in a row above the February 2001 level.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
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.
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?
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EconModel
The Economics Roundtable is sponsored by EconModel.
The Classic Economic Models cover micro, macro, and financial markets.
EconBrowser (James Hamilton)
"Analysis of current economic conditions and policy”
Interest rates on government debt for a number of European countries-- notably Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain-- shot up considerably during 2010-2012. Those yields have fallen significantly from their peaks, though these five countries still face higher borrowing costs than most other countries in Europe.
In a blogpost taking stock of the IMF conference on lessons from the crisis, the Nobel laureate distills the lessons learned.
The Heritage Foundation's Salim Furth writes:
Mortgage buyer and insurer Fannie Mae was in the news again this week.
The impact of contractionary fiscal policies, from NY Times, based on Moody's Analytics estimates.
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written Hiro Ito (Portland State U.) and Ulrich Volz (U. London SOAS and DIE). This article is based Ito and Volz (RIE, 2013).
Broad market indicators like the S&P500 have been making all-time nominal highs. What's the significance of that for investors and the economy?
Crowding Out Watch, Continued
The end of the semester has arrived, and as I prepared my last lecture, I checked to see how the government deficits had impacted yields. Real yields were pretty much as they were when the semester began in January.
In a graphically interesting discussion of the April employment situation release, James Sherk and Salim Furth write:
Beginning with the third quarter of this year, the BEA plans to report the U.S. GDP and national income accounts on a new basis. One of the purposes of the change is to better reflect the importance of intellectual capital and technological innovation in the modern economy. ...