Economics Roundtable
The Problem - II
Calculated Risk adds the the clearest picture of the housing tailspin.
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The Problem - I
Calculated Risk has the clearest picture of the problem we face.
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Special Topic 8/4/10
This week, the Roundtable will feature a special listing for reaction to the payroll employment figures from ADP on Wednesday and the BLS on Friday.
ADP: +42,000
BLS: -131,000/+71,000
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Special Topics 6/28/10
This week, the Roundtable will feature special listings for reaction to Wednesday's
CBO budget projections and the
payroll employment figures
from ADP on Wednesday and the BLS on Friday.
ADP: +13,000
BLS: -125,000/+83,000
CBO: Take your pick.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Current Economic Conditions 6/5/10
James Hamilton summarizes the situation.
EconModel
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Economics One (John Taylor)
"A Blog by John B. Taylor”
September 2, 2010, 4:35 am, 758869
The Taylor rule says that the federal funds rate should equal 1.5 times the inflation rate plus .5 times the GDP gap plus 1. Currently the inflation rate is about 1.5 percent and the GDP gap is about -5 percent (using the average of the seven estimates of the ...
August 29, 2010, 2:35 pm, 756730
I write from Jackson Hole Wyoming as the early morning sun shines sharply on the Grand Tetons where I just spent a very enjoyable few days at the annual monetary conference. I have been coming to these Jackson Hole conferences on and off since the first one on monetary policy ...
August 24, 2010, 12:35 am, 753884
The Soviet Union used to provide me with plenty of current event stories to tell students in Economics 1 about the wastes and harms of price controls and central planning. But most first-year college students taking introductory economics this fall were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752886
The resilience of emerging market economies severely hit by the panic of 2008 is amazing, especially in comparison with the long emerging market crisis period of a decade ago. I have ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752885
The following is a reasonable summary, in my view, of the available evidence on the impacts of discretionary fiscal and monetary policy actions taken before, during, and after the recent financial crisis:
The available evidence…casts grave doubt on the possibility of producing any fine adjustments in economic activity by ...
The available evidence…casts grave doubt on the possibility of producing any fine adjustments in economic activity by ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752884
In his recent review in The New York Review of Books of my book Getting Off Track, Roger Alcaly makes a very interesting point about the “too low for too long” hypothesis, according to which the Fed helped cause the housing boom. I hear that some policymakers at the ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752883
Next Thursday March 25 the House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on how the Fed should exit from its quantitative easing. This past week I was in Japan discussing the Japanese experience with QE with traders and experts in the financial sector and in the Bank of Japan. ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752882
Three years ago, a study of low and declining prices on Iraq's debt by Michael Greenstone of MIT helped paint a bleak picture of the effectiveness of the surge, as, for example, in this November 2007 New York Times op-ed by Austan Goolsbee "In the Bond Market, a Bleak ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752881
The 3.2 percent growth rate of real GDP in the first quarter (released by BEA yesterday) confirms that the recovery is looking more U-shaped than V-shaped. But it also provides further ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752880
My column published last Monday May 3 in the Wall Street Journal “How to Avoid a ‘Bailout Bill’” generated a lot of questions about the idea of a "Chapter ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752879
In a column Central Banks are Losing Credibility published in the Financial Times last Tuesday, just after the announcement of the European rescue plan, I noted that the euro’s quick set-back hours after its initial boost was a harbinger of negative consequences. The euro's continued decline throughout last week ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752877
For about two years—from August 2007 to September 2009—fluctuations in the spread between dollar Libor and the overnight index swap (OIS) served as a valuable quantitative indicator of financial stress in the interbank loan market. It also served as a measure of the impact of various government interventions. The paper ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752878
In a soon to be published paper, several economists at the International Monetary Fund report estimates of government spending multipliers which are much smaller than those previously reported by the U.S. Administration. In order to obtain the estimates the IMF economists use a very large complex model called the Global ...
August 20, 2010, 8:14 pm, 752876
This past weekend’s meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Korea ended with a rejection of calls for more fiscal stimulus. This is a marked change from their meeting held just over a month ago in Washington. It’s a change for the better. Nowhere in this ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752874
Many economists argue that the Greek government, even with the help of the European/IMF rescue package, will eventually have to restructure its debt. Just last Friday in a Bloomberg News story ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752875
People often ask me what it’s like to teach both introductory economics courses and Ph.D. level economics courses in the same academic year, which I have done regularly for many years at Stanford including this year. The courses are at extreme ends of the educational spectrum, and there are several ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752873
Each year for the past 25 years the National Bureau of Economic Research has sponsored a conference on macroeconomics with a special emphasis on empirical research with policy relevance. The results are published in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. Initiated by Martin Feldstein when he was president of the NBER, the ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752872
Poland is the only country in the European Union which did not have a recession during 2009, as shown in this chart. And among all the OECD countries, Poland had the ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752871
A common criticism of the Dodd-Frank bill keeps coming up as more people wade through the several hundred sections, or at least summaries of them. This common criticism is that the bill contains many false remedies and errors of omission. The criticism comes from both the left and the right. ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752870
Just before Americans started celebrating the July 4th weekend, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual Long Term Budget Outlook. The chart shows the CBO projection of the federal debt (as a percent of GDP) assuming that current law or policies do not change as defined in the CBO ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752869
Everyone now seems to agree that the exploding federal debt is a serious problem that must be addressed. But how? The following two charts provide some data to help answer that question. I put the charts together using budget data from CBO’s new Long Term Budget Outlook released on June ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752867
The number of economists arguing forcefully against efforts to use more deficit spending to stimulate the economy is increasing. Their arguments differ in important respects, ranging from empirical evidence that the stimulus programs thus far have done little to help the economy to the recognition that the growing debt ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752868
Is the economy slowing down and what has been the role of government? Recently EconTalk host Russ Roberts and I discussed these questions and our conversation was made available today as a podcast at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Like many economists, I am concerned ...
Like many economists, I am concerned ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752866
Yesterday the New York Times published an article about simulations of the effects of fiscal stimulus packages and financial interventions using an old Keynesian model. The simulations were reported in an unpublished working paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi. I offered a short quote for the article saying ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752865
PBS Newshour hosted a live TV debate between Mark Zandi and me yesterday on the question of whether government interventions helped or hurt the economy. The show highlighted a paper by Alan Blinder and Zandi about which I posted comments on this blog yesterday. Several people who watched ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752864
Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap has suddenly become the focal point for debating how America should get its economic house in order. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says to embrace it. Paul Krugman of the New York Times says to reject it. And all the pundits are predicting ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752863
This week marks the third anniversary of the flare up of the financial crisis in August 2007. Howard Green, Headline anchor at the Business News Network in Canada, broadcast the news this way in today’s lead-in to an interview with me to mark the occasion: “It was exactly three years ...
August 20, 2010, 8:13 pm, 752862
Does China’s remarkable economic growth, its stability during the recent financial crisis, and its immense foreign aid/investment in Africa raise doubts about free market policies and provide evidence in favor of a more interventionist approach? In a new review paper, my colleague Ronald McKinnon says “Surprisingly no.” In fact, ...