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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Donald Marron
"Musings on Economics, Finance, and Life”
Over at the Kauffman Foundation, Tim Kane has released his latest quarterly survey of economic bloggers. Here’s the usual word cloud reflecting the adjectives (up to five per respondent) that we econobloggers offered up to describe the U.S. economy:
Yes, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. As always in such comparisons, however, there are some caveats.
CBO summarizes its main results in this handy chart:
Report author Justin Faulk summarizes the findings as follows:
Differences in total ...
Last week, I noted that former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun enrolled 160,000 students in an online computer science class. That inspired him to set up a new company, Udacity, to pursue online education. A new article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek adds some additional color to the story.
My latest column at the Christian Science Monitor takes a crack at this perennial question. Short version: You ought to add about $4.6 trillion to whatever debt figure you are using. Why? Because the United States has about $7.3 trillion in non-debt liabilities (mostly pension and health benefits), offset by about 2.7 trillion ...
That’s what former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun aims to do.
Sound impossible? Well, he’s already taught a class of 160,000 students. As Felix Salmon recounts:
Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford ...
The top tax rate on long-term capital gains is currently 15%. That’s why Mitt Romney is spending so much time talking about his tax returns.
That revelation has set off a familiar debate about whether that low rate is appropriate. Often overlooked in these discussions, however, is the fact that the ...
Over at Bloomberg, Julie Johnsson and Mark Chediak document how low natural gas prices are reshaping electricity markets. Wind, nuclear, and coal all look expensive compared to natural gas generation:
With abundant new supplies of gas making it the cheapest option for new power generation, the largest U.S. wind-energy producer, NextEra ...
In 2010, I wrote a series of posts documenting how oil and natural prices had decoupled from each other (see here and here). For many years, oil prices (as measured in $ per barrel) were typically 6 to 12 times natural gas prices (as measured in $ per ...
Friday’s jobs data confirmed that labor markets are getting better, but slowly. Payrolls expanded by 200,000, the unemployment rate fell again to 8.5%, weekly hours ticked up from 34.3 to 34.4, and hourly earnings rose by 0.2%.
Of course, there is still a long, long way to go. Unemployment and underemployment ...
Auto companies have made great strides in improving engine efficiency in recent decades. But those improvements haven’t done much to improve the fuel economy of America’s passenger car fleet. Instead, consumers have “spent” most of those efficiency improvements on bigger, faster cars.
MIT economist Christopher Knittel has carefully quantified these tradeoffs in a recent paper ...