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
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Modeled Behavior (Karl Smith)
"A styllized foray in to the world of highly fashionable ideas.” Karl Smith.
Hopefully within the next day or two we will be able to get Modeled Behavior.com to redirect to our Forbes Blog. Yet, it looks as if there is no way to get our RSS feed to continue to work. Here is a link to our new RSS feed a Forbes. ...
A quick announcement: we’ve moved the blog to Forbes. You’ll be able to find us there at blogs.forbes.com/modeledbehavior, and soon modeledbehavior.com will redirect there. All our old links will still work, and an archive of the old site will be available soon. Thanks to everyone for reading, commenting, and ...
Catherine Rampell has some excellent coverage of the GOP war on the ACS that does an admirable job of not pulling punches and calling nonsense out as nonsense:
It is, more or less, the country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what ...
On Karl’s Up With Chris Hayes appearance, Betsey Stevenson rightly pointed out the obvious falseness of the claim that we would be better off if we defaulted on our debt during the debt ceiling crisis. Everyone seemed to agree it was a problem that there were no elites to come ...
I am on Up With Chris this morning starting at 8AM on MSNBC with Betsey Stevenson, Bill Black, and Ezra Klein.
Filed under: Babble
I don’t know enough about the science to tell whether this is a significant step forward in neural-interface systems, or just the specific potential of neural-interface systems to aid paralyzed individuals, but this report from the NYT is encouraging in any case:
Two people who are virtually paralyzed from the ...
Eagle Ford development is proceeding a bit slower than I would have hoped. Nonetheless, the numbers are impressive.
From the Houston Chronicle
Production in the Eagle Ford could reach 1 million barrels a day by 2016, said Trevor Sloan, director of energy research at ITG Investment Research in Calgary, ...
I define the simplified version of the Sumner Critique as follows: If the Central Bank is targeting Nominal GDP precisely then all other macroeconomic effects become classical in nature.
This is obviously an extreme position as it requires not just omnipotence but omniscience and for lack of a better term omnibenevolence ...
So there has been a lot of chuckling over Scott Walker’s suggestion that his office is going to produce its own statistics.
This is important to me because it highlights a couple of things.
First off what does it mean to “create 250K jobs.” I am going to tell you that ...
Key points
Krugman and some of the cyclicalists have focused the vast majority of their attention on cyclical issues. But this reinforces the (mistaken, misleading) claim of the structuralists that there is a tradeoff between the short term and the long term. One more Krugman blog post is not going ...