Economics Roundtable
Database Maintenance
Over the July 4 holiday, scheduled database maintenance will likely produce some odd reposts as the database resynchonizes to the various blog formats.
Thinking About Jobs
Jeff Frankel lays out a balanced view of the current employment statistics.
Last Month: Jeff Frankel says that the labor market has NOT yet signalled a turning point. Check the graph of weekly hours at the bottom of the page.
Clive Granger, 1934-2009
We have lost an original thinker of the first magnitude. Clive W. J. Granger.
Auctions and Politicians
Catch up on the background for one of the newest areas of Economics Engineering.
The Clark Medal: A Hindcast
David Warsh identifies the likely winners of the John Bates Clark Medal for even-numbered years. The award has, of course, been announced only in odd-numbered years. Who did we miss?
Why Card Issuers Engage In Rate-Jacking
Adam Levitin of Credit Slips explains another "benefit" of securitization. The economics of this market structure are stunningly bad.
The Geithner Plan
Will it work? Paul Krugman says no.
The New York Times'
Room for Debate
includes Simon Johnson, Brad DeLong, and Mark Toma.
Equilibrium and Meltdown
George Waters addresses the economic crisis and the state of macroeconomics.
Gzing! Gzing! Gzing!
David Warsh offers a fascinating account of the invention of earmarks. Catch his review of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, by Robert G. Kaiser.
Monetary Policy in Three Steps
Step 1: Buy private assets from banks while selling Treasuries, effectively trading private assets for Treasuries, leaving reserves with the Fed unchanged.
Step 2: Buy private assets from banks, paying with deposits with the Fed (new money) because the portfolio of Treasuries is shrinking. Banks make little attempt to convert deposits with the Fed into loans. Nothing much happens to loans and the money supply, but excess reserves explode.
Step 3: Banks start to expand loans on the basis of massive excess reserves. The Fed has to drain hundreds of billions in excess reserves to regain control of the money supply. The Fed does this by selling private assets back to the banks.
We are now well into Step 2. Step 3 should be interesting.
Why AIG was in the CDS Business
Felix Salmon explains how taxpayers get to pay the claims after AIG collected the premiums. It is really very simple.
VoxEU -- Free Online Book
Rescuing our jobs and savings: What G7/8 leaders can do to solve the global credit crisis -- Contents Page
Richard Baldwin, Barry Eichengreen
"Without rapid and coordinated action by G7/8 leaders, this financial crisis could turn into a jobs crisis, a pension crisis and much more. This column introduces a collection of essays by leading economists on what the G7/8 leaders should do this weekend. The dozen essays present a remarkable consensus on a few points: we need immediate, coordinated global action that includes recapitalisation of the banks."
Economic Principals
Congratulations to David Warsh on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of EP.
The First Global Financial Crisis
of the 21st Century
A VoxEU.org Publication
Edited by Andrew Felton and Carmen Reinhart
Read the announcement
and/or download selected chapters.
Review: the topic itself is important, but this book also marks a new direction for online discussion.
Great Articles by Famous Economists
The Library of Economics and Liberty includes The Concise Encyclopeida of Economics. To see how many well-known economists have contributed browse by category .
EconModel
The Economics Roundtable is sponsored by EconModel.
The Classic Economic Models cover micro, macro, and financial markets.
Jeff Frankel’s Weblog
"Views on the Economy and the World”
The quip “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics” is variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain. What should the public make of government statistics, such as the monthly ...
The effects of a changing global climate show up gradually, decade by decade. The effects of a changing US political climate on this issue have also been showing up gradually, year by year. A ...
The rate of decline in employment fell abruptly in May, according to the BLS figures released June 5, to about half the monthly rate of job loss ...
The current visit of Secretary Tim Geithner to China once again shines the spotlight on the Renminbi (RMB) and demands by US politicians that the People’s Bank of China (the country’s central bank) ...
I was recently asked by the National Journal to comment on what I thought was a desirable path for tax reform, if one could wish away political constraints that normally handcuff politicians. My answer was, of course, to tax energy, particularly carbon emissions, and use the revenue to ...
The Commerce Department this morning announced its advance estimate of last quarter’s real GDP. As expected, the estimate shows that GDP fell in the first quarter of 2009 — by a hefty 6.1 per cent at an annual rate. An implication is that the recession has just tied the ...
Most international summit meetings are long on photo-opportunities and short on substance. Last Thursday’s G-20 meeting in London did have genuine substance.
Nobody reads the communiques, or listens to the press conferences of leaders or finance ministers. But here it is:
Top of the list ...
Many reactions to the plan that Secretary Tim Geithner announced today have been negative, both from the left and the right. Paul Krugman is one, and he makes some good points.
But the proposal has its defenders. One is Brad DeLong, who also makes some good points. The Geithner Plan is ...
By roughly the five-year mark after the launch of the euro in 1999, enough data had accumulated to allow an analysis of the early effects of the euro on European trade patterns. Studies include Micco, Ordoñez and Stein (2003), Bun and Klaassen (2002), Flam and Nordström (2006), ...
In July 2005, the Chinese government announced that it was changing its official exchange rate regime. As American politicians had been demanding, the renminbi or yuan would no longer be pegged to the dollar. Rather the authorities would: