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.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
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 $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
EconModel
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Environmental Economics
"Economists on Environmental and Natural Resources: News, Opinion, and Analysis”
John grew up in the hoity-toity land of Derby Hats and Mint Juleps. Me? Well...here's a walk down memory lane (Some potentially NSFW content).
Saw this on my way home yesterday and got a chuckle (at a stop light in case you think I was violating Ohio's driving laws by taking a picture with a handheld device while moving). The bumper sticker reads "TOO POOR TO BE A REPUBLICAN." The car is a Lexus ...
What the @#$%, Ohio? You swear more than Illinois? More than New Jersey?
More than New freakin’ York?!
That’s the finding of the Seattle-based Marchex Institute, and if you don’t like it, you probably shouldn’t tell researchers where to stick it. They already think the Buckeye State has the tact of a drunken fool.
The ...
Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.
Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.
Men's upper-body strength ...
So I was narcissistically staring at my LinkedIn profile (send me a connection, I'm trying to boost my own self-esteem by getting to 500+ connections--even if I have no idea what LinkedIn is useful for) and I noticed that I have been endorsed more than twice as much ...
For six decades, Americans have tended to drive more every year. But in the middle of the last decade, the number of miles driven — both over all and per capita — ...
In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman writes:
As far as I know, among basic textbooks only Krugman/Wells even talks about the liquidity trap.
This is probably a true statement. It is not that other books don't cover the topic, however. It is just ...
... DeLong, Krugman, Econbrowser, Calculated Risk, Free Exchange, Environmental Economics, and a few more ...
via economistsview.typepad.com
Actually, it is something else. Here is what Mark Thoma said about these blogs:
Some of the RSS feeds in the sidebar stopped working for mysterious reasons ...
But still, at least we were ...