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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Credit Slips
"A Discussion on Credit and Bankruptcy”
For the umpteenth time, President Obama has announced that his solution to the foreclosure crisis is to encourage "responsible" homeowners to refinance at lower interest rates. Adopting the Tea Party rhetoric and blaming home buyers who got houses in 2006 for their inability to foresee what few economists ...
A case out of the Third Circuit demonstrates the frustration that many of us have with the current state of consumer arbitration law. The consumer had purchased a Dell computer that he alleged had design flaws leading to repeated failure of his motherboard. After Dell refused ...
Bloomberg out with an interesting story about how private equity firms are buying single family homes at foreclosure to rent out. It surprises me that there is real interest in what remains a relatively small scale, highly heterogeneous asset. Previous attempts to achieve economies of ...
In many respects, bankruptcy is a one-size-fits-all legal process. Yes, there are ample differences in the law (and a world of difference in practice) between the bankruptcy of a large corporation and a typical consumer. But the Bankruptcy Code itself contains plenty of provisions of general applicability. A ...
During the State of the Union address, the President crowed about the success of the GM/Chrysler bailouts, noting that these companies were thriving again. An NPR program this evening was holding up GM/Chrysler as a beacon of hope for Kodak, as if bankruptcy were now the fountain of ...
Anna Gelpern's Gunboat Diplomacy post pretty much sums out the leaked German term sheet on Greece. I would only note one other thing--the highly idiosyncratic use of "absolute priority." The Germans seem to have taken the language of Chapter 11 and repurposed it, with ...
Someone who wanted to be very mean to the Germans just leaked this document, where they manage to come off as both desperate and inept. The proposal purports to address Greek failure to meet program targets by installing an EU overlord, whose job it would be ...
Unless Greece and its creditors reach a deal in the next few days, Greece has no money to pay €15 Billion or so due to its bondholders in March.
From the start, this has been a crisis of fake legal and economic constraints masking very real political constraints. ...
Steve's title was subtle, so in case anyone missed it, here are the materials on Public Citizen's website. The petition calls on the Federal Reserve and the Financial Stability Oversight Commission to use their authority under Dodd-Frank to break ...
On behalf of all the Credit Slips bloggers, it is my pleasure to announce the permanent return of Professor Melissa Jacoby as one of our "Occasionals." For the past several weeks, she had doing some guest posts, but we are very happy that she has agreed to ...