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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Capital Gains and Games
"Washington, Wall Street and Everything in Between”
This should eliminate all doubts about how little some members of Congress understand about federal finances.
As Dana Milbank explains in his column from today's The Washington Post, eight House Republican freshman made a grandstanding play this week to get public attention and credit for something that makes no financial ...
Here are two easy-and-quick-to-read pieces on the magnitude of the military spending changes Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually announced last week. The simple answer according to two people who know is that the reductions are less than the headlines indicated.
First, over at the Will and the Wallet, CG&G alum ...
For some reason the dollar coin keeps coming up.
A press release in my inbox yesterday announced that Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and John McCain (R-AZ) had introduced the "Currency Optimization, Innovation and National Savings (COINS) Act" that would create yet another dollar coin. This is the Senate version of a ...
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) apparently thinks the root cause of all our budget problems is changing the budget process. My column from today's Roll Call explains why, even though changes are needed, what he's proposing and when he's proposing it is an attempt to do something ...
It was just two weeks ago that I explained why OMB directors in general are seen as good White House chiefs of staff by the presidents they serve.
In a very strong piece in today's The Washington Post, Ezra Klein explained why one particular former OMB Director -- Indiana Governor ...
My Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I have both been caught by speed cameras -- several times for each of us -- in recent years. So before you start screaming that I would feel differently if it had happened to me, please keep in mind that it has ...
It was several years ago during the Q&A portion of a presentation I was giving about the federal deficit in a VERY socially and fiscally conservative suburb of Detroit that I was asked a simple and very sincere question: Why doesn't the federal government legalize heroin and crack and then tax the ...
If this clip from earlier today in the House floor when Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ) resigned doesn't make you at least a little teary, you have no soul.
Last night' State of the Union Address almost certainly made deficit hawks very unhappy, extremely angry and, from a policy perspective, close to suicidal. After pushing hard for so long to make the deficit the issue, it was barely a footnote in the president's hour-plus address and wasn't missed that ...