Depends what your trade is RT “@TheStalwart: IMO a decisive SYRIZA victory would be better for markets than a narrow ND victory.”
United States Channel: Latest Posts
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United States
Expansionary Fiscal Contraction in Action (or Not)
The recession in the UK is even worse than first reported. Figure 1: UK annualized q/q GDP growth (chained 2008), calculated as log differences. Dashed line at 2010Q2 (new coalition government). Source: UK ONS. 2012Q1 growth is revised down from -0.1% (quarterly rate) to -0.3%. As I noted earlier [1], this should put (yet another) [...]
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United States
The Fed and the Fiscal Cliff
Ryan Avent has an ambitious post, in which he claims the Federal Reserve will resist proclaiming it has the tools to offset the fiscal cliff, should it even occur: The Fed could therefore proclaim to the world that will maintain aggregate demand growth (in the form of, say, nominal income growth) at all costs, and [...]
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United States
Housing: Permits, Starts, Completions
For the crowd who are still clinging to the RE recovery meme, have a gander at these charts. Note that there are more new permits than starts, and more new starts than completions: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Thee (Not Me) Click to enlarge: ˜˜˜ ˜˜˜ All charts via Ron [...]
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United States
The Housing Recovery: An Update
Last December I wondered if the housing market was finally poised for a sustainable recovery after years of retreat. There were signs for thinking optimistically then and the latest numbers continue to suggest that mild growth will roll on. Comparing three key measures of housing activity through April on a year-over-year basis shows that the [...]
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United States
James K. Galbraith: We Told You So
James K. Galbraith is an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations. He writes about economics for numerous publications. His latest book, “Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis” (Oxford University Press, 2012), is [...]
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United States
The Three Faces of Postcrisis Monetary Policy
The latest edition of the San Francisco Fed’s Economic Letter (written by Michael Bauer)has a nice review of the different channels through which the Fed’s Large Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programs—QE, or quantitative easing more popularly—are thought to work: “Central bank LSAPs potentially may affect interest rates through at least three channels. Notably, all three [...]
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United States
State Dependence and Fiscal Multipliers
Or, are there nonlinearities in the real (macro) world? Following up on Jim’s Sunday post on multipliers, I found this graph from the April IMF Fiscal Monitor of interest: Figure from IMF Fiscal Monitor, April 2012. The authors describe the results underpinning this graph thus: The model finds significant evidence that the impact of fiscal [...]
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United States
Fiscal Stimulus
My colleague UCSD Professor Valerie Ramey has an interesting new paper looking at the effects of higher government spending on GDP. Ramey (2012) approaches the question from a forecasting perspective. Suppose a certain event (examples of which are detailed below) causes you to revise your forecast of how high government spending is going to be [...]
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United States
Hoover on Austerity to Balance the Budget and Defend the Dollar in 1932
I have written quite a few posts highlighting the statements made by Herbert Hoover during his US presidency as he struggled with the economic contraction of the Great Depression (see posts tagged “Herbert Hoover“). The general tenor of Hoover’s comments and actions goes to redoubling efforts toward balancing the federal budget in order to bring [...]
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Latin America
North American Competitiveness
Last week I attended a conference “Made in North America: Competitiveness, Supply Chain, and Transportation in the NAFTA Region,” which was part of World Trade Week’s events here in New York. From the interesting panels there emerged three main points, one positive and two less so. The positive outlook is that macroeconomic and global winds [...]
