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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Felix Salmon
What mean reversion? This is two fantastic jobs reports back-to-back, with the second even better than the first.
You thought the December jobs report was great? I certainly did — but it’s been revised, now, and it’s even better than was first reported. And the January report is positively ...
Edward Wyatt makes a very good point today — why is the SEC doing big favors for big banks, every time it slaps a fine on them?
If a bank settles a fraud case, it automatically loses certain privileges, like the ability to issue debt securities opportunistically, without going through ...
Ken Doctor has a very smart and interesting take on the news that the NYT now has 390,000 paying digital subscribers — plus another 16,000 at the Boston Globe. It’s unambiguously good news, on many fronts.
First, and most importantly, digital ad revenues went up by 10% in the ...
Many thanks to Mark Bergen for finding me this data; I asked him for it because I thought that maybe we could learn something from the way in which China has managed to keep employment growing steadily through some extremely turbulent economic times.
What you’re looking ...
Binyamin Appelbaum has helpfully aggregated all the Fed presidents’ financial disclosure statements in one place. The richest Fed president is Dallas’s Richard Fisher, who used to run an investment fund called Value Partners. And the legacy of Value Partners is still visible in Fisher’s statement: he owns more ...
Anisha Sekar of Nerdwallet has officially launched a comparison tool which allows you to work out which prepaid debit card might be best for you — and, crucially, allows you to compare the cost of a prepaid debit card to the cost of a bank account. Nerdwallet has ...
Jesse Eisinger is back with a follow-up to his original piece about Freddie Mac and the inverse floaters; he’s also left a long comment on this blog, responding to various criticisms of his story which appeared in the blogosphere.
There are two main pieces of new information in ...
Der Spiegel has a long and meticulously reported piece on the state of affairs as it exists right now between Germany and Greece, naturally concentrating on attitudes within Germany. Meanwhile, Yanis Varoufakis has a much more Greek take on the same subject at CNN. And by far the ...
Robert Reich has three very good questions about Sebastian Thrun’s new online university, Udacity, which I wrote about last week. I spoke to Thrun yesterday, so I took the opportunity to clear them up.
Reich begins:
1. Why did Thrun need to quit Stanford? Why not pursue the project ...
Jesse Eisinger and Chris Arnold have a really good story about Freddie Mac today, a company which is preventing mortgage refis at the same time as it’s making enormous prop bets that homeowners are going to continue to find it hard to refinance.
Back in September I noted that ...