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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Eurointelligence
The big news this morning are the details of the proposals by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, which also include a new sanctions regime for countries in breach of deficit rules. The two leaders want the European Commission to check more thoroughly whether money received under the structural funds ...
The debate on Eurobonds has reached fever pitch in Germany. Sueddeutsche Zeitung writes that the German government was now actively discussing Eurobonds internally. While Angela Merkel was still officially opposed, senior government officials and ministers have been debating the issue for some time, and believe that ...
Welcome back to our Daily Morning Newsbriefing. Over the last two weeks the crisis and the political debate have moved on significantly. After the spike in Italian and Spanish spreads, all eyes are now focused on tomorrow’s bilateral meeting between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Today’s big ...
This is not a full newsbriefing, just a short crisis update. In the last few days, the eurozone bond markets experienced extreme price movements on little trading volume. The rise in Italian and Spanish yields – and fall in German yields – continued this morning.
In terms ...
If you want to know how the EFSF could implode all of a sudden, you got a glimpse yesterday. Reuters quoted unnamed eurozone officials as saying that Italy may not be able to participate in the next Greek tranche in September, due to the rise in its own borrowing ...
Moody’s yesterday downgraded Cyprus to two notches above junk, as the country looks set to become the EFSF’s forth customer. On a day, in which the Italian and Spanish markets came under further pressure, EU officials were headed for special talks with the government in Nikosia, but said no ...
There is always a point towards the end of July when the eurozone news flow drops of sharply due to the summer holidays. We may have reached that point today. Even though the situation remains hopeless, it is no longer deemed to be serious.
As bond yields ...
One of the few safe financial bets in the eurozone is a rise in stock markets/fall in bond spreads right after a European summit. This time, the bull’s party lasted for about a day. The optimism receded on Friday, and by last night the bond markets returned to more ...
Due to sad events elsewhere, the eurozone crisis has been pushed of the front pages for once, but it rambles on. Bond spreads came down Thursday, but increased on Friday, and more since then. We are not quite back to where we were before the summit – but with ...
Markets are always jubilant after a European summit because they focus on the headlines, not the substance. The overnight market reaction was quite extreme. Italian 10-year spreads were down to 2.5bp, and Spanish spreads down to 2.896% this morning. This tells us that the summit managed to move the ...