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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- Recent Entries
• Summary for Week ending February 3rd
• Schedule for Week of February 5th
From the Association of American Railroads (AAR): AAR Reports Gains for January Rail Traffic
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) reported that total U.S. rail carloads originated in January 2012 totaled ...
SPARKS, Nev.On a day when the improving economy threatened to undermine Mitt Romneys main argument to voters, he made a pitch to win over swing voters like Al Babb.
LAS VEGAS — At least one Republican presidential candidate is not trying to frame Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report as a failure of President Barack Obama.
When reporters here asked Newt Gingrich for comment on the jobs numbers as he shook hands with voters at a mostly empty saloon, the former House ...
COLORADO SPRINGSMitt Romney, who has been selling himself as the presidential candidate best qualified to turn around the economy, acknowledged Saturday that things are improving and then proceeded to tear into President Barack Obama‘s economic policies.
Im delighted things are getting better. I think they are, Mr. Romney told a ...
How ...
There are three lanes, with the left two lanes narrowing into one. A slight bit further ahead, the traffic from Gallows Road merges into the right lane, map here.
Many people from the far left lane merge “unethically,” driving ahead as far as they can, and then asking to be ...
Every day for weeks we have heard a "deal is close". Moreover, on multiple occasions at ...
Don’t tell me that the Dems favor fiscal stimulus because they like big government. The payroll tax cut will make it a bit more difficult to expand the size of government in future years. (As Clinton found in 1993, when he was told the “bond markets” (i.e. the Reagan ...
I am worried that policymakers are too anxious to reverse course. That is, despite recent communications suggesting that policy will remain on hold or even be eased further, I'm worried that the Fed will increase interest rates too soon. In the past, any sign of green shoots has brought ...
• Summary for Week ending February 3rd
This will be a light week for economic releases. The key economic release is the December trade balance report to be released on Friday.
Also on Friday Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will speak to the National Association of ...
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"Cheap natural gas has also thrown energy markets into turmoil. It is impossible for almost any other source of electric power to compete, especially coal and nuclear. By trimming fuel bills, cheap gas ...
Industry-Ranks-2-2012
I’m working on my quarterly reshaping — where I choose new companies to enter my portfolio. The first part of this is industry analysis.
My main industry model is illustrated in the graphic. Green industries are cold. Red industries ...
Employment activity in the non-manufacturing sector grew substantially in January, as ISM's Non-Manufacturing ...
Steve Horwitz – influenced, methinks, by my former student Adam Gurri – explains why pedestrian economics (here, alas, peddled by Paul Krugman) is mistaken to measure the contribution of entrepreneurs by how many workers they directly employ.
Steven Horwitz
I'm currently in Brazil at a summer seminar for young Brazilians interested in libertarian ideas sponsored by the Atlas Foundation and OrdemLivre.org in the beautiful mountain town of Petropolis outside of Rio. On Thursday, I participated in a debate at the equivalent of the Chamber ...
The employment report was well above expectations. There were 243,000 payroll jobs ...
If you ignore the mindless tittle-tattle, David Miliband’s New Statesman article raises a genuine issue: what should be the left’s attitude to the state? He writes:
The weaknesses of the "big society" should not blind us to the policy and political dead end ...
One related story is here.
Addendum: Qatar, by the way, last year paid about $250 million for a Cezanne “Card Players.” The details ...
… is from page 119 of the 1978 edition of David Friedman‘s 1973 The Machinery of Freedom:
Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.
This year the base salary for doing God's work rose to $2 ...
$0.03: The average cost per viewer for thirty second of ad time during the Super Bowl.
super
ZUMAPRESS.comThe average advertiser during the Super Bowl will pay about $3.5 million for one thirty ...
● The People's Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt
By Scott Rasmussen
Interview with author via Newsmax
Independent pollster and political analyst Scott Rasmussen tells Newsmax that the real federal debt is ...
Rogoff’s real hero, however, was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion of the 1970s. He remembers following the games from the famous Fischer-Spassky world chess championship in 1972, and being awed by Fischer’s play – “It was like seeing the hand of God at work; the originality, the simplicity.” He ...
Here is the unofficial problem bank list for Feb 3, 2012. (table is sortable by assets, state, etc.)
Changes and comments from surferdude808:
Quiet week for the Unofficial Bank List with ...
Please consider Greece’s leaders oppose new austerity measures
All three party leaders in Greece’s teetering national unity government ...
Will Italy be able cut its debt and abide by the new EU fiscal rules? This column presents a simulation of the evolution of the Italian debt-to-GDP ratio. It finds that Italy’s borrowing and saving plans are sustainable – even at ...
Employment growth accelerates along several dimensions: nonfarm payroll, an alternative measure of nonfarm payroll, private employment, hours, and civilian employment (report here). However, JEC vice chairman Brady (JEC-Republicans) states in a press release: "Job Numbers Mask Underlying Job Weakness."
The Bonddad blog points out ...
by Chidem Kurdas
The Republican primaries have been all-out fights, with a series of contenders showing strength in polls and challenging the establishment favorite Mitt Romney, only to fall back after the initial success. Newt Gingrich is the latest to rise and, after his loss in the Florida primary, presumably to ...
Thomas Hartmann writes via Truthout:
Most Americans don't realize that the idea that ‘corporations are people’ and ‘money is speech’ are concepts that were never, ever considered or promoted or even passed by any legislature in the history of America. Neither were they ever ...
Via No Depression:
Athens, GA: Some of the greatest songs were written to give voice to anxiety, despair and unwanted change. “After it’s Gone”, a new single just released by Patterson Hood and the Downtown 13, was inspired by the threat of a Walmart in the heart of the downtown ...
Comparisons can be useful in determining where the economy is at any given point in time, and today's Employment Situation report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides another opportunity to do just that. According to that report, the U.S. economy added 243,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in ...
Tim Duy:
Good News on Employment, by Tim Duy: With only a minimal drag from the government sector, the February employment report shined on the back of a solid gain in private sector hiring:
The last couple ...
Construction employment increased by 21 thousand jobs in January, after increasing by 74 thousand jobs in all of 2011. Last year was the first year with ...
Dimitri Papadimitriou and Randall Wray deliver a second installment of their joint assessment of the risks that a renewed global financial crisis might be triggered by events in Europe or the United States. In their latest one-pager they move past disputes over etiology and lay out their solutions for both ...
The Senate voted to ban executive bonuses at Fannie and Freddie.
After buttering up the public for another round of quantitative easing, the buzz today (at CNN, Fin Times and the WSJ) is that the January jobs report will kill QE3 forever.
The census bureau released new homeownership ...
In China a fapioa – the official receipt used for expense claims has a resale face value of 2 – 10% of face value – leaving one behind in a restaurant or taxi is the equivalent of giving a tip (in a culture where tipping is uncommon) and not requesting ...
Here’s a letter to Washington, DC’s, WTOP Radio:
During today’s 11am hour you interviewed a Nevada GOP official who listed “strong enforcement of drug laws” as a “family value.”
His claim is questionable. Consider this observation by Pepperdine University Professor James Q. Wilson, a noted conservative and explicit proponent of the ‘war ...
global economic growth over the past few decades has outpaced the capacity of the world economy to produce truly safe assets
Really? The U.S. could have just deficit-spent more, crediting people’s/businesses’ checking accounts and thereby increasing the global stock of the world’s safest asset: U.S. dollars.
It could (by ...
With all the cheering about the jobs report this morning showing 243,000 jobs created last month and a fall in theunemployment rate to 8.3 percent, I thought it might be useful to present a contrary voice (especially since I'm at a conference and don't have time to do ...
Hiring looks like a rabbit, but expect job growth to shift into a slower pace soon. U.S. non-farm payrolls posted gains of more than 200,000 in December and January. That pace of hiring helped to bring down the jobless rate, which slipped to a nearly three-year low of 8.3%.
WRITING on the surprisingly strong January jobs report, my colleague says:
Will the better tone to the jobs market deter the Federal Reserve from further monetary easing? Not yet. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, acknowledged the moderately better tone to economic data yesterday, but the last official Fed statement ...
THE treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a permanent bail-out fund for the euro zone, was signed in Brussels on February 2nd. It now needs to be ratified by the 17 members of the single currency, with the aim of coming into force in July. The ESM is designed ...
Do you receive a tax deduction for the interest paid on your mortgage or for the taxes you pay to your state and local governments? Would you think about those deductions in the same way if instead of seeing a reduction in taxes for those items the federal government instead ...
“Economic conditions are entirely different today than they were in Reagan’s era, and different conditions demand different policies. Those who say otherwise are simply engaging in cookie-cutter economics — proposing whatever was popular and seemed to work once, without regard to changing circumstances”—Bruce Barlett in a WaPo piece entitled ...
The RGDP growth rate has been 1.6% in the 4 quarters since late 2010, which is below everyone’s estimate of trend growth (except perhaps Tyler Cowen…
There is much more at the link, from Scott Sumner. Of course Michael Mandel, Peter Thiel, Garry Kasparov, and some others would quality as ...
1. Markets in everything bride price decomposition the culture that is Nigeria.
2. David Cronenberg interview.
3. How exactly do we know, from the photo, that she is on the political left rather than right? Seriously. Here is her blog and profile. Here is her Twitter feed. ...
In the last year, the civilian population rose by 3,565,000. Yet the labor force only rose by 1,145,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 2,420,000. In January, the Civilian Labor Force rose ...
I am here today:
NBER EF&G Research Meeting
Nir Jaimovich and Guido Lorenzoni, Organizers
February 3, 2012
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
PROGRAM
8:30 am Continental Breakfast
9:00 am Gary Gorton, Yale University Guillermo Ordonez, Yale University Collateral Crises Discussant: Veronica Guerrieri, University ...
From the Institute for Supply Management: December 2011 Non-Manufacturing ...
Fridays monthly unemployment report showing an unexpectedly large gain in new jobs and a drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3% from 8.5% is welcome news for President Barack Obama, whose biggest challenge in the November election is the economy.
The White House pointed to the report as more evidence ...
President Barack Obama used Fridays monthly jobs report to criticize the Republican candidates hoping to unseat him this fall, saying unequivocally that the economy is growing stronger.
The recovery is speeding up, Mr. Obama said Friday in remarks at a fire station in Northern Virginia. We cant go back to the ...
Whenever the unemployment rate drops, economically savvy observers know to ask a key question: What happened to the employment-population ratio?
Under the governments ...
Note: This post updates the that column originally appeared as the Ahead of the Tape with the latest employment numbers.
Call it the case of the missing start-ups.
It isn’t small businesses so much as new businesses that typically power job growth during economic recoveries. Trouble is, that engine isn’t firing ...
The News Hub panel provides comprehensive coverage of the improving U.S. employment picture. The Labor Department reported 243,000 non-farm payroll jobs were added in January.
...Some indigestible food for thought: there is not a single state in the Union—not one—in which the top 1% of income earners pay a higher rate of state taxes than the bottom 20%. For the majority of states, it’s not even close: the poorest 20% pay somewhere between double and ...
How good does must the economy get to be an asset for Barack Obama's re-election? The tough arithmetic is captured in the nearby table, which is drawn from the latest Economist/YouGov poll. Mr Obama's approval rating on the economy is deeply negative. It would have to get considerablybetter than it ...
Is the jobs recovery finally for real?
It certainly feels that way. Before getting into the caveats, let's look at January's solid employment report. Non-farm employment jumped 243,000, or 0.2%, from December, the best in nine months. The unemployment rate fell to 8.3%, a three-year low, ...
This paper of mine on the Turkish economy was completed more than a year ago but has just been published in the new journal of the Turkish Economic Association. Re-reading it, I feel it captures well the missed opportunities of the last few ...
In today’s European Wall Street Journal, Arnold Kling eloquently and concisely explains his idea of “PSST” – patterns of sustainable specialization and trade – and highlights how an understanding of the economy based upon PSST differs fundamentally from an understanding based on Keynesianism. I encourage you to read the ...
Rhode Island's capital city will be in bankruptcy by June if it doesn't get help resolving its financial crisis.
That was ...
By Bill Testa and Norman Wang
In the Midwest, the terms “industrial” and “cities” are almost synonymous. Though agriculture has been important to growth and development, the region’s economy was built on manufacturing, and the sector continues to be prominent—for both small towns and large metropolis alike.
However, labor and income ...
The benchmark revision increased total employment in March 2011 by ...
There were 243,000 payroll jobs added in January, with 257,000 private sector jobs added, and 14,000 government jobs lost. ...
Fewer Americans are being laid off than in previous months as the labor market strengthens. The number of workers filing new claims for unemployment benefitsan indicator of the pace of layoffsfell by 12,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 367,000. Thats well below the 400,000-plus new claims filed weekly in ...
According to one little-followed measure, the economy created nearly 500,000 jobs last month — about twice as many as the governments official figure of 243,000.
To gauge employment, the Labor Department uses two separate ...
Economists and others weigh in on the increase in jobs and drop in the unemployment rate.
–Our quick read through of todays report shows that this is unquestionably a positive report in nearly every way. Average hourly earnings isnt as strong as wed like it to be ...
Over the years, a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying ...
1. Temporary employment reached a 3.5-year high in January of 2.4 million jobs, the highest level since May 2008 (see ...
Today's employment report from the U.S. Labor Department delivered a hefty blow against the idea that recession risk is high for the immediate future. Private nonfarm payrolls rose by a net 257,000 in January (total nonfarm payrolls rose by a slightly lower 243,000 because of a 14,000 decrease in ...
Since August, the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.1% to, as of the last report in January, 8.5%. Good news, without question, although incomplete given the fact that several of those monthly drops occurred because the ...
This isn't a new problem, but it's getting worse. Since back in the Eisenhower era, the federal government has maintained a Highway Trust Fund, paid for mostly by taxes on fuel, that helps cover the repair and construction of our country's roads, ...
What mean reversion? This is two fantastic jobs reports back-to-back, with the second even better than the first.
You thought the December jobs report was great? I certainly did — but it’s been revised, now, and it’s even better than was first reported. And the January report is positively ...
Political realism — as both an experiential or historical matter and a methodological one — must be at the center of a thoroughgoing libertarian project, informing our criticisms and proposed solutions. ...
In 1789, the political price for our federal constitution included a bailout of the 13 indebted states. But it was by refusing to bail out the states a second time in the 1840s that the United States preserved its federal system, with substantial fiscal independence for state governments. Facing a ...
All good news, 243k up but lots more information in the numbers, try @JustinWolfers or @BetseyStevenson for details and interpretation. The “big loser” here?: Old Keynesianism. You really can get a recovery when the real shocks are moderately positive. You will note, as we have been told many ...
… is from page 61 of Frank Trentmann’s important 2008 book Free Trade Nation – a book that I thank Walter Grinder for bringing to my attention. In the section of the book from which the following quotation is taken, Trentmann is discussing Joseph Chamberlain’s “Tariff Reform” – an ...
The good news? It looks to be much better than all the new shows from last year. The bad news? It's another CSI. Still, with broadcast television being what it is, you should make room on your fall TV viewing schedule for CSI: Legoland! ...
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job growth was widespread in the private sector, with large employment gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, ...
Judging of what we are by what we ought to be, I have persuaded myself that this body might accept this reasonable proposition. The proposition is peace. ...
Political realism — as both an experiential or historical matter and a methodological one — must be at the center of a thoroughgoing libertarian project, informing our criticisms and proposed solutions. It can furnish the fresh approach to social questions people around the ...
Edward Wyatt makes a very good point today — why is the SEC doing big favors for big banks, every time it slaps a fine on them?
If a bank settles a fraud case, it automatically loses certain privileges, like the ability to issue debt securities opportunistically, without going through ...
What does Apple owe it’s workers? I’ve read some silly proposals since the big New York Times story on the difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions in it’s factories. For instance, the idea that Apple should give some of it’s massive cash horde to workers in China. But Apple and ...
Who does Romney care about?:
Romney Isn’t Concerned, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: ...Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean ...
All from the most recent issue of New York magazine.
"How Much Does an A-List Actor Make . . . and Spend?" Interesting and something I'll bet you won't hear our president complain about:
Payments don't go to the actor (or producer) but to a personal corporation subject ...
Loyal MR reader V has a request:
1. Engage with the arguments by Sailer and his ilk that Mexican immigration is different than the waves of the 1920′s, 1880′s, etc.
Specifically, they cite the example of New Mexico, current Latin America, evolving California, etc. where class-based hierarchies that closely mirror IQ differences ...
Tim Duy:
How This Gets Even Uglier, by Tim Duy: At this risk of beating a dead horse, I reiterate that I don't see how the European situation comes to a happy conclusion. Conditions in Greece appear to be deteriorating rapidly. Via Athens News, ...
Following that ceremonious signing it took precisely two days for European bureaucrats to propose "Application ...
American Airlines needs $18.5 billion to cover its pension promises to current and former employees, but it has only set aside ...