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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"Views on the Economy and the World”
This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its first estimate for 2011 GDP. It showed national output for the first time surpassing the pre-recession peak, which occurred in the last quarter of 2007. (See chart below, at the bottom.)
Given that the economy hit its trough in mid-2009, the ...
Obama’s slogan for the SOTU last night, “An Economy Built to Last,” was a way of referring to one of the accomplishments of his first years, successfully reviving the auto industry, which many said couldn’t be done without nationalizing it. References to other accomplishments were stated more quickly (withdrawal from ...
Emerging markets have performed amazingly well over the last seven years. They have outperformed the advanced industrialized countries in terms of economic growth, debt-to-GDP ratios, and countercyclical fiscal policy. Many now receive better assessments by rating agencies and financial markets than some of the advanced economies.
As 2012 begins, however, ...
In the current issue of Foreign Policy, the editors of the FP Survey ask “top experts” for pithy solutions to the world’s economic problems, “twitter style.” Some of the answers:
THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS …
Anti-market bias. -Bryan Caplan • Procrastination. -Peter Diamond • Short-term ...
Libyans have a new lease on life, a feeling that, at long last, they are the masters of their own fate. Perhaps Iraqis, after a decade of warfare, feel the same way. Both countries are oil producers, and there is widespread expectation among their citizens that that wealth will be ...
My preceding blogpost, the Hour of the Technocrats, was inspired by the recent accession of Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, both professional economists, to the prime ministerships of Italy and Greece, respectively. Today we turn to the U.S., where the political process seldoms view academic credentials benevolently.
In the ...
The Hour of the Technocrats has arrived. In desperation from debt crises that their gridlocked political systems have created, Italy and Greece both in November chose new Prime Ministers who are technocratic economists rather than politicians: Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, respectively. One can even describe them as professors: Monti ...
The parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are meeting once again in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9. The period covered by the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012 and the clock is running out on negotiations for a successor agreement. Progress at
Many questions in the field of financial regulation are hard to answer: Would the separation of commercial banking and investment banking help prevent crises? To what extent should individual consumers be protected against foolishly borrowing too much? Should Credit Default Swaps be regulated out of existence? What should regulators do ...
US News and World Report asks, “Who is handling its debt crisis better: Europe or the United States?” My answer follows.
In both Europe and the United States, the current public debt woes are attributable to mistakes made by political leaders going back more than a decade. In both cases ...