Economics Roundtable
March 2017 Fed Funds Rate
What is the effect of a 0.25% change in the Fed Funds rate?.
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March 2017 Payroll Employment
Payroll employment has not grown impressively since 2000. Some baby-boomers retired, but that does not totally account for this graph.
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May 2014 Payroll Employment
After 76 months, we finally got back to the prerecession level of payroll employment.
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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 .
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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.
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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Crooked Timber
"Out of the CROOKED TIMBER of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
I got into a bit of a twitter fight with the always interesting Bruno Milanovic yesterday. It was a second-hand fight, because he’d already been involved in one with Kate Raworth and had blogged about that. What was interesting to me was how Milanovic believed some things to be not ...
Jacob T. Levy has written a really interesting piece for the Niskanen Center, which has at its centre the myth that the postwar era was one of sovereign and national democratic control and the fantasy that’s what we need to restore, a fantasy that fuels both the current wave ...
I just finished Richard Rothstein’s brilliant—and far from uplifting—book The Color of Law. It’s been getting a lot of favorable press, and rightly so.
The book accepts (for the sake of argument, maybe—Rothstein is always ...
Last night I watched Citizen Jane, a recent biopic about Jane Jacobs and her long fight against Robert Moses’s plans for New York. Of course, Jacobs was largely correct: Moses’s grand utopian schemes wrecked the ecologies of street and community and eventually produced neighbourhoods worse than the ones they replaced, ...
To misquote Benjamin Franklin and others, the only certainties in economic life are debt and taxes. Among the themes of political struggle, fights over debt (demands from creditors to be paid in the terms they expect, and from debtors to be relieved from unfair burdens) and taxes (who should pay ...
This is the second in a series of projected posts that try to look at the Trump administration and right wing populism through the lens of different books. (the first – on civil society – is here). The last post was mostly riffing on Ernest Gellner. Today, it’s another ...
I’m working on the environmental policy chapter of my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons, which is a reply to Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which in turn is a repackaging of Bastiat’s What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. Hazlitt was aware of the difficulties posed for laissez-faire by ...
That’s the title of my latest piece in The Guardian. There are two key points
First, in terms of effective tax rates and tax paid, any means-tested Guaranteed Minimum Income can be replicated by a non-tested Universal Basic Income, and vice versa
Second, for a number of reasons, it would be ...
Henry’s post was interesting. It reminded me of an anecdote passed along by an acquaintance, who shall go nameless.
The individual in question is involved in publication of limited run, high quality art books. You can’t do that if you can’t make significant profit, per unit. (‘Volume volume volume!’ doesn’t ...
This FT article is pretty interesting:
The classic example of industrial-era price fixing dates back to a series of dinners hosted amid the 1907 financial panic by Elbert Gary, then chairman of US Steel. In a narrow first-floor ballroom at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, men controlling 90 per ...