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.
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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?
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EconModel
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Multiplier Effect
The Levy Economics Institute Blog
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Hyman Minsky’s new book, Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare (there is also a Kindle version). Take a look at the cover – Minsky looking like a bit of a rougue!
I thought you might enjoy my powerpoint presentation, given at the Levy-Ford annual ...
The formation of the eurozone represents “the wildest experiment in financial history,” according to C. J. Polychroniou:
the eurozone was to involve the inclusion of independent states, with highly diverse economic systems and cultural settings, that were required to give up national currency sovereignty in exchange for a “foreign” currency ...
That’s the implication of a James Pethokoukis post linked to here by Reihan Salam. Let’s assume for the sake argument that a federal budget surplus does emerge in 2015 (yesterday’s CBO report projected the 2015 deficit would be a mere 2.1% of GDP). Salam expresses concern that such ...
In a new policy note, Jan Kregel draws out some of the policy lessons of the Cypriot deposit tax episode for plans to create a system of EU-wide deposit insurance. In addition to the necessity of a strong central bank (the ECB in this case) standing behind the deposit ...
Narayana Kocherlakota is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and is known for an uncommon feat in high-level policy circles: he changed his mind. Originally a monetary policy hawk, Kocherlakota has become a supporter of looser Fed policy. He spoke recently at the Levy Institute’s Minsky ...
In economics, there is a remarkable “stickiness” in bad ideas and confusions. In fact, some bad ideas and confusions never seem to go away. For instance, last summer Martin Feldstein bravely suggested that euro weakening would help solve the euro crisis and rescue Europe (WSJ: “A weaker euro could ...
In recent days both Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman have written good pieces arguing against the austerity marketed by deficit hyperventilators. We can thank Thomas Herndon’s muckraking that pushed the topic front and center, showing that there is no empirical evidence in support of the austerian’s claim that big government ...
When top managers at our largest financial firms claim to have been oblivious of dangerous financial practices carried out under their watch, the most serious implications for regulatory reform don’t actually follow from scenarios in which these managers are lying. It’s a bigger deal, in terms of how far we ...
France and Germany held largely contradicting hopes and aspirations for Europe’s common currency. To France the key issue in establishing a European monetary union was to end monetary dependence, both from the vagaries of the U.S. dollar and from regional deutschmark hegemony, and to establish a global reserve currency that ...
Today’s GDP report estimated that the US economy grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013. If the economy were translating GDP growth into jobs at rates similar to those seen in the past, this 2.5 percent pace would not get us to full ...