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.
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John Quiggin
"Commentary on Australian & world events from a social-democratic perspective”
Yesterday I took part in a debate with Judith Sloan, organised by the Economic Society of Australia, on the topic of labor market regulation. Before commencing, Judith paid me the backhanded compliment of saying that debating me was “like wrestling an eel”. I’ll take the complimentary part of the implication ...
I quote in full the Audit Commission’s response to my critique, as reported by the Oz
The statement only responds to the findings of the QCU study, and not those of Professor Quiggin.
“There are no other points of substance in his (Quiggin’s) report which warrant a response,” the statement said.
I’ve just finished a critique of the audit commission. Here’s the Courier-Mail report. There’s another report also due out today from Bob and Betty Walker, who were commissioned by the QCU. I did mine independently, but, like them, with the aim of being out in time for next ...
… unless you expect to be in for one term at most. Having announced that Queensland is on the verge of defaulting on its public debt, as in Greece and Spain, and sacked thousands of public servants, Campbell Newman is now proposing to build a brand-new office tower in the ...
Over at Slate, Dave Weigel has a series on progressive rock for which he admits a fondness, while quoting a description of it as the “single most deplored genre of postwar pop music.”. Thanks to the playing of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells at the Olympics opening ceremony, ...
The discussion of my repost on the silliness of generational tropes produced a surprising amount of agreement on the main point, then a lot of disagreement on the question of technological progress. So, I thought I’d continue reprising my greatest hits with this review of Kurzweil’s singularity post, which ...
Australians installed more domestic rooftop solar PV in 2011 than in any other country in the world. Despite sharp cuts in subsidies, that seems likely to continue, and raises the question of how this will effect patterns of electricity demand and in particular the capacity of the electricity system to ...
Those are the marvellous names for the old common law offences/torts involved in persuading others to engage in a lawsuit for your own benefit (feel free to state more precisely, IANAL). They’ve mostly been abolished now, which is probably a good thing in terms of alllowing class actions and ...
One of the long-running disputes in the theory of education is whether students are actually acquiring knowledge and skills that will be useful to them and society, both in earning an income and in life generally (among economists this has the unlovely name of human capital theory) or whether the ...
In the light of the latest news of large-scale fraud in the for-profit vocational education sector, I thought I would repost this from CT (in turn a repost of an article in Campus Review, that’s no longer on the website).
I also found a response by Andrew Norton