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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e21
Economic Policies for the 21st Century
Did you notice how the U.S. economy was suddenly thrown into recession this year when tax increases and spending cuts took effect? If you didn’t, that’s no surprise because the economy actually accelerated to 2.5% growth in the first quarter of 2013 from just 0.6% growth in the fourth quarter ...
[This is the third in a multi-part series on streamlining government services. See part 1 here. See part 2 here.]
The progressives and muckrakers undoubtedly had it right at the turn of the 20th century. Corrupt government and unregulated business foisted high costs and dangerous conditions on ...
Those who believe more government spending is the antidote to the current economic malaise generally rely on one or more assumptions to defend their nonsensical position: (1) the future costs of servicing debt issued to finance larger deficits don’t matter or are trivially small; (2) the central bank can control ...
[This is the second in a multi-part series on streamlining government services. See part 1 here.]
For thirty years I have labored on behalf of a cause for which no significant natural constituency exists: effective government. Sure, some citizens support larger government and others smaller government but few lead ...
The federal income tax code is saddled with inefficient exemptions, deductions and credits. Streamlining them is an important policy goal, and Senator Max Baucus and Congressman Dave Camp, the respective Chairmen of the two tax writing committees in Congress, are in the process of working through ...
Last week, careful research by UMass-Amherst professors found that the seminal paper by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart contained a data error that biased their conclusion that debt-to-GDP ratios in excess of 90% lead to dramatically slower economic growth. The 90% of GDP figure was arbitrary with no ...
Among the spurious contentions made by President Obama’s FY 2014 Budget submission, none is bigger that the claim that enactment of its policy proposals in full would completely erase the long-run U.S. budget imbalance and pay-off ...
[This is the first in a multi-part series on streamlining government services]
Partisan officials, policymakers and commentators remain transfixed by how much government should tax, spend and redistribute. President Obama argues that higher taxes will result in greater equity and Republicans say reducing deficit spending is only ...
Today's employment situation report is a dismal one, coming in far below expectations. Every month, Matt McDonald at Hamilton Place Strategies produces a cheat sheet summarizing the key statistics and trends. Click on the image for a larger version.
As e21 first pointed out last October, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are extremely profitable. The cash flow relationship between the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and the Federal Government has now reversed: instead of receiving bailout funds from the Treasury in the form of senior preferred stock purchases, the ...