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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Macro and Other Market Musings
David Beckworth.
February 2, 2012, 9:26 pm, 948008
An important problem facing the global economy is the shortage of safe assets, assets that facilitate transactions at both the retail and institutional level. There is both a long-term, structural dimension to this problem as well as a short-term, cyclical one. The structural dimension is that global economic ...
January 31, 2012, 9:26 pm, 947557
Ryan Avent's
initial enthusiasm for the Fed's new communication strategy is beginning to
wane. Avent began to lose his new-found Fed religion after reading Lorenzo Bini Smaghi's
critique of the Fed's new policies. Here is Smaghi:
[I]f the objective of price stability is defined over ...
January 31, 2012, 9:26 pm, 947556
From the latest
Kauffman Economic Outlook, a quarterly survey of economic bloggers, we find this figure:
Too bad bloggers cannot run the Fed. At least we have changed ...
January 26, 2012, 7:26 pm, 946403
The FOMC has
spoken and here is what it said (my bold):
To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with the dual mandate, the Committee expects to maintain a highly accommodative stance for monetary ...
January 24, 2012, 9:26 pm, 945452
Fareed Zakaria
points us to what may be the shinning star of Europe:
[P]erhaps the biggest reason for poverty-stricken nations like Egypt to pay close attention to Poland is that it is a very rare breed in today's world, especially in Europe. Poland has a strong ...
January 23, 2012, 7:26 pm, 944907
The Fed is about to release it first long-term interest rate forecast. Gavyn Davies
explains how this could enable U.S. monetary policy to add more stimulus without actually expanding its balance sheet. It would do so by managing nominal expectations. Here is Davies:
What is ...
January 19, 2012, 11:26 am, 943460
The ECB has a serious communication problem. It has undertaken a number of unconventional measures lately--the three year
LTROs, the acceptance of questionable assets for collateral, and the large expansion of its balance sheet--that amount to a
QE program by stealth. And therein lies the problem. ...
January 18, 2012, 3:26 pm, 943102
This is
dissapointing:
Speaking at a foreign policy forum in South Carolina on Tuesday, Gingrich advocated a "commission on gold to look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money."
I guess Newt Gingrich has not been reading fellow conservative ...
January 16, 2012, 3:26 pm, 942248
James Pethokoukis has a new article in
Commentary that examines nominal GDP (NGDP) targeting and its potential to spark a recovery. The piece starts out fine, but then gets gets confused because it fails to distinguish between a NGDP growth rate target and a NGDP level target. ...
January 16, 2012, 1:26 pm, 942203
Kenneth Kuttner has a new
paper that reexamines the relationship between the Fed's interest rates and house prices during the housing boom. The paper is receiving
some attention because it claims that the existing literature on this topic collectively shows only a small role for interest ...
