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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January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810901
The bad news is that the headaches and fatigue you’ve been experiencing aren’t just stress. According to our tests, you have a serious illness, and if it’s not treated soon, you could be dead within a year or two.
The good news is that the treatment is 100% ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810902
Everybody knows that, in the aggregate, trade increases welfare. We can quibble about how to aggregate welfare across individuals, but at least in a Kaldor-Hicks sense, trade increases welfare. In that aggregate welfare sense, trade is a free lunch, and that lunch is wasted if nobody eats it. ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810899
Here's my Monday evening quarterbacking. They should have guaranteed Citigroup's liabilities (in other words, extending deposit protection to other types of creditors and to large depositors) rather than its assets. (Perhaps nobody had the authority, but Congress should give them that authority now in case the same thing ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810900
Before the Treasury decided to start issuing TIPS, I was a strong advocate for inflation-adjusted bonds. At the time, I felt that people were overly concerned with inflation. (That was the mid-90’s, and I think subsequent experience bore out that opinion.) I thought that the government should ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810898
Why? Because the government gets to pay with monopoly money and get paid back with real money.
Right now, with the T-bill rate at approximately zero, the Fed can effectively create an unlimited amount of money to finance the government. No matter how many T-bills the Fed ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810897
(My apologies to those with religious dietary restrictions...and to those who hate the letter P)
Greg Mankiw's hypothetical
alliterative stimulus critic worries that the stimulus package will be "pointless, political, and pork-filled." Perhaps. But it's hard for this person to perceive how a proposal that is ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810896
In
my last post I argued
...the general purpose of stimulus packages is to mobilize the economy's unused resources, and, in this particular case, to...prevent prices from plummeting. Does the presence of pork in a package...in any way hinder the pursuit of such purposes? As far as the deflation ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810893
I put together a series for commodity prices as measured by various CRB indexes. Since there have been a couple of new CRB indexes introduced at certain times, and the new indexes have each eventually supplanted the earlier version, I patched together a series going back to 1950 using ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810891
For Sepetmber 2008, the monetary base was reported at $903.5 billion. For October, it was reported at $1.1285 trillion. That's an increase of $225 billion. That's how much money the Fed created directly in one month. A couple of months of that would be enough to ...
January 17, 2011, 12:44 am, 810892
Just a quick thought. Ben Bernanke suggested today that the Fed might start buying longer maturity Treasury securities now that it has done about all it can at the short end of the yield curve. Sounds like a good idea, but here's my question: If reducing yields ...
