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.
EconModel
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- Recent Entries
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From my op-ed in today’s Investor’s Business Daily:
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Guest post by Michael Cahill
The Affordable Care Act’s Prevention and Public Health Fund: Why it needs to succeed for America’s Economic Future
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by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
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John Maynard Keynes met Franklin Roosevelt on Monday, May 28, 1934. Both afterward said polite things to Felix Frankfurter, who had urged the two to confer: Keynes described the conversation was “fascinating and illuminating,” while Roosevelt wrote that “I had a grand talk and liked him immensely.”
But the best-known ...
The Center for American Progress has released a report by Adriana Kugler, Robert Lynch, and Patrick Oakford arguing that legalizing undocumented immigrants will generate significant benefits for Social Security’s financing. According to SSA, about half of undocumented immigrants currently pay payroll taxes, using a false or expired Social ...
From FNC: FNC Index: Rise in Home Prices Picks up in April
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Starting in 1994, soon before the 1996 welfare reform bill (PRWORA) the state of Florida explored what was roughtly a pilot version the “Family Transition Program” (FTP). I recall reading at the time that this was the only reformed welfare program with a hard time limit on benefits. Importantly, ...
Special points
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Tim Duy:
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The federal government has been borrowing rapidly to finance recent budget deficits. But that’s not the only reason it’s gone deeper into debt. Uncle Sam also borrows to issue loans, build up cash, and make other financial investments.
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There is a clear seasonal pattern for inventory, withthe low point for inventory in late December or early ...
We have been advocates of the theory that fiscal tightening is threatening economic recovery (last week, for example).
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The federal government has been borrowing rapidly to finance recent budget deficits. But that’s not the only reason it’s gone deeper into debt. Uncle Sam also borrows to issue loans, build up cash, and make other financial investments.
Those financial activities have accounted for an important part of government borrowing in ...
Not exactly correct on all point, but worth a read.
In fact, there is one anarchist who could be considered influential in Washington, but he wasn’t among the activists who participated in the Occupy movement—he died nearly twenty years ago. His name is Murray Rothbard, and, among small-government Republicans, he ...
1. Jamal Anderlini at the FT on Chinese overcapacity.
2. Education and the job market in China, and theft of caterpillar fungus by brutal gang.
3. Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon even exist?
4. The TV culture that is Norway.
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The football coaches at Army, Navy and Air Force.
Here is more (mostly on other topics), hat tip to @jtlevy. Here are some comparable answers for state government employees.
On Money and Its Effect on Morality... originally appeared on About.com Economics on Monday, June 17th, 2013 at 12:50:57.
An Obituary for Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel... originally appeared on About.com ...
The original iPhone app is still available ...
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is the pithy and tweetable way the Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, asks the question, “What happened to the future?”
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North Dakota set another new monthly oil production record at 793,302 barrels per day (bpd) in April according to oil production data released last Friday by North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources (see chart above). For the ninth month in a ...
From Tim Ellis at Redfin: Here Comes the Inventory
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by Roger Koppl
I was thinking of the NSA scandal while jogging through Rome’s Park of the Aqueducts this morning. I guess it was that setting that made me think of our new computer-geek overlords as a virtual Praetorian Guard. Augustus created the original Praetorian Guard about 27 BCE ...
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Tianhe-2, developed by the government-run National University of Defence Technology, topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, by a team of international researchers.
They said the news was a "surprise" since the system had not been ...
From the NAHB: Builder Confidence Hits Major Milestone in June
Builder ...
A new book by the Levy Institute’s Randall Wray and Éric Tymoigne (release date July 31):
The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism: Minsky’s half century from World War Two to the Great Recession
The book studies the trends that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, ...
By Simon Johnson
Global megabanks and their friends are pushing back hard against the idea that additional reforms are needed – beyond what is supposed to be implemented as part of the Dodd-Frank 2010 financial legislation. The latest salvo comes from Goldman Sachs which, in a recent report, “Measuring the ...
Should the next Labour government embrace fiscal conservativism as Hopi Sen suggests? I'm genuinely not sure.
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We have been writing for the last two months about the simple proposition that government can in fact work much better, faster and cheaper. Despite varying opinions about the appropriate size of government, politicians should be able to agree that the taxpayer money government spends must be spent wisely.
Politicians, ...
Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth, in 1964. This ...
The June 2013 Empire State Manufacturing Survey indicates that conditions for New York manufacturers improved modestly. The general business conditions index—the most comprehensive of the survey’s measures—rose nine points to 7.8. Nevertheless, most other indicators in the survey fell. The new ...
By James Kwak
For years now, Anat Admati has been leading the charge for higher capital requirements for banks, especially large banks that benefit from government subsidies, first in a widely cited paper and more recently in her book with Martin Hellwig, The Banker’s New Clothes. Admati’s great ...
The Screen Actors Guild and several players’ unions have filed briefs supporting Mr. Hart, saying that athletes, actors and other celebrities must have the right to control the use of their identities and to harvest the financial fruits of their fame. The movie industry, book publishers and news organizations, ...
While the ethics behind holograms of deceased celebrities might be questionable (in the words of a parody Twitter account called Aaliyah’s Ghost, “The best duets imo are the ones where both artists are alive & agreed to work together”), copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the ...
1. Does legalized prostitution favor human trafficking?
3. For and against science prizes.
4. Will you settle for a flying bicycle?
5. Scott Sumner on sticky nominal wages, and Japanese girlie group spans the asset space (update).
6. Markets in everything: Czech corruption ...
Responding to this link, Ryan writes:
I think the secular decline in various measures of dynamism is a pretty important topic, largely because we haven’t been able to figure out what’s causing it. We’re seeing it not only in worker flows but also job flows, migration, startup rates, etc.
Industry ...
At 7:03 p.m. on May 25, my dog went to the bathroom in front of the Chinese massage place up the block from my house in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
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1. Greg Mankiw on income inequality (pdf).
2. Elysium official trailer #2.
3. Mistakes in German architecture, a three-way interview. Pretty amazing, and full of lessons about management and infrastructure and social capital and fiscal policy and principal-agent problems, not to mention the future of Europe: “The pure truth ...
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I suspect nothing in this book can be trusted. Still, it is one of the more stimulating reads of the year, though I have to be careful not to draw serious inferences from it. Does its possible fictionality make it easier to create so many interesting passages?:
I ...
Megan McArdle updates us:
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For a few years now Dani Rodrik has been tweeting about how second-rate, illegitimate, and undemocratic the current Turkish regime is. He never convinced me, not because I held firmly to some opposing perspective, but simply because I don’t follow Turkish politics closely enough for claims of any kind to ...
1. The forthcoming push for (more) Chinese urbanization.
2. In The Great Reset, there is probably no Nashville Symphony Orchestra.
3. Robin Hanson TEDx talk on robot society.
4. Markets in everything: guinea pig armor edition, and more on seasteading.
5. The face slimmer exercise mouthpiece from Japan.
6. ...
Here is a very good discussion by Nelson Schwartz, here is one excerpt:
He is not predicting an imminent resurgence. Like most academic economists, Mr. Cowen focuses on the next quarter-century rather than the next quarter. But new technologies like artificial intelligence and online education, increased domestic energy production ...
Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers ...
It’s worth emphasizing that the recent rise in interest rates has been a global phenomenon, not just something seen in the United States.
That is from James Hamilton.
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) represents more than 85 percent of the assisted reproduction industry. SART requires that its members work only with agencies that limit compensation to egg-donors to around $5000 or a maximum of $10,000 (figures decided upon by the ethics committee of an affiliated ...
… is from page 70 of David Friedman’s 1996 book, Hidden Order:
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To add to the fire Jazz and Steve have kindled, YOY inflation is at its lowest level historically according to the BEA and Next New Deal blog. It does not look like we need austerity policies and a little fiscal fire might put people back to work and stir the ...
The dumb money is learning it's dumb and is taking steps toward becoming really smart. But if they become smarter, that will create more opportunities for the "smart" people to become even smarter, making the dumb people relatively dumber. Again.
Got it?
I excerpted him here.
BBC News[!] provides a pretty good answer: "10 Reasons Why So Many People Are Moving to Texas".
Bonus: "17 Reasons Why Houston is the Best City in America".
Well, it's not really "versus" because Mr. Mauldin doesn't provide the full text of John Seater's comments. It's understandable that he didn't want to copy into his column what I'd guess was were lengthy comments, but he should have posted them on his website and provided readers with ...
Monaco has an unfair advantage in recruiting top soccer talent: players move to avoid high taxes.
So do corporations.
And so are--soon probably a lot more will--Americans. (Bonus follow-on to that link: "Midland Ain't Pretty, But It Works".)
You would think that this poll showing "Americans' confidence ...
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Dan Pallotta, Chief Humanity Officer of Advertising for Humanity and author of Uncharitable talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his book. Pallotta argues that charities are deeply handicapped by their culture and how we view them. The use of overhead as ...
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Good news for America’s unpaid army of latte-fetchers and lunch-order-takers! A Federal district ...
I went to two conferences in the past couple of weeks: the Underbanked Financial Services Forum, in Miami, and the Clinton Global Initiative’s America conference, in Chicago. At the former, I was introduced to a company called Cognical, which pitched itself as a tool which will allow lenders to ...
Joanne's three closest friends, Kathy, Marybeth, and Debbie all wanted me to move on, have fun, meet someone and enjoy life.
Why are we so worried about highly uncertain budget projections extending decades into the future when we have very real problems such as high levels of unemployment that need our immediate attention?
Fight the Future, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role ...
Welcome to the Counterparties email. The sign-up page is here, it’s just a matter of checking a box if you’re already registered on the Reuters website. Send suggestions, story tips and complaints to Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com.
Good news for America’s unpaid army of latte-fetchers and lunch-order-takers! A Federal district ...
Greece decided that all tax returns will be filed electronically.
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Why be libertarian, anyway? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an ...