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
The Economics Roundtable is sponsored by EconModel.
The Classic Economic Models cover micro, macro, and financial markets.
Dani Rodrik’s weblog
"Unconventional thoughts on economic development and globalization”
What follows below is the original, unedited version of my oped in the Financial Times today, for those who cannot access it.
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The protests that engulfed Turkey in recent days caught by surprise even those observers who, like me, have been vehement critics of Prime Minister Tayyip ...
The World Economics Association recently interviewed me on the state of economics, inquiring about my views on pluralism in the profession. You can find the result on the WEA's newsletter here (the interview starts on page 9). I reproduce it below.
1. How would you ...
This is so absolutely brilliant and important:
“One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.”
It comes from Kaushik Basu, currently chief economist at the World Bank and one of the world’s most thoughtful expert-economists.
Economists ...
This is ...
This column on “The Tyranny of Political Economy” quickly rose to become the most-read piece on Project Syndicate – quite to my surprise, as it deals essentially with an academic subject. I take the recent rational-choice political economy to task for ignoring the role of ideas in shaping how ...
My new Project Syndicate column deals with the age-old battle between the liberal and mercantilist models of capitalism. While liberalism has won the intellectual fight, the real-world battle is still on, and is likely to shape the future of the world economy.
[I]t is more accurate to think of mercantilism ...
The Turkish court overseeing Turkey’s Sledgehammer case has finally issued its much awaited reasoning behind the verdict of last September, which found 330 officers guilty of plotting a coup in 2003 against the then-newly installed AKP government. The fabrication of evidence and the manipulation of the judicial process in the case ...
Kenen produced landmark work in international trade, international money and ...
(This is the English-language text of an interview published in the Swedish journal Respons)
The main argument in The Globalization Paradox is that we can’t simultaneously pursue economic globalization, democracy and national determination, but at most have two out of three. You also write that EU ...