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.
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The Economists’ Forum
By Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda
The global economic recovery remains stuck below takeoff speed, unable to achieve liftoff and facing the risk of stalling. Half-hearted fiscal austerity measures are proving to be a drag on growth and doing little to rebuild investor and consumer confidence.
Monetary policy continues ...
By Lenos Trigeorgis
EU politicians have been locked in myopic and often self-defeating policies regarding bailout of troubled eurozone countries. They have insisted, in principle correctly, that troubled countries bring their finances to a sustainable path. But the austerity measures used are killing the growth prospects of these countries and damaging ...
By Michael Pomerleano
Paradigms accepted as self-evident truths occasionally need to be re-examined. Corporate taxation is one of them. While governments are looking more and more for fiscal resources to fill budget gaps under the auspices of “rationalizing” the corporate tax systems, this article argues that a new, ...
European court ruled that stability mechanism was not contrary to EU law. Image by Getty
By Professor Simon Deakin
Courts don’t often try to decide the direction of economic policy. ...
By Kevin P. Gallagher
Negotiators will meet in Singapore this week for yet another round of talks on a Trans-Pacific Partnership – it is the 16th time in just a few years. A TPP would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the US hopes would counter China’s ...
By Heleen Mees
With anger directed towards bankers and rating agencies alike, this may be a good time to remember that low interest rates, rather than faulty mortgage products, are the root cause of the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession.
I once quipped that to understand the origins of the financial ...
Which is more probable: Africa becomes a virtual international province of China, the main source of its sub-soil assets, and the major component of China’s strategy for its own domestic stability; or China becomes a way African nations upgrade their economies and integrate into the global value chain for manufacturing. ...
By Catharine B. Hill
The recession continues to create challenges for higher education in the US. Appropriate responses depend on expectations for the economy in the future, and whether the shocks we have experienced are short- or longer-term trends. Moody’s US Higher Education Outlook Negative in 2013 report does little to ...
By Dr Miles Livingston
The legendary John Bogle, founder and former chief executive of The Vanguard Group, recently met with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to urge it to propose a rule that would require anyone providing retail investment advice to act as a fiduciary.
Mr Bogle and two other representatives ...
By Professor Simon Deakin
Under the government’s current proposals for employment law reform, employees will be able to give up rights concerning unfair dismissal, redundancy pay, flexible working and time off for training in return for receiving shares in the company that employs them, gains on which will be exempt from ...