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The Revenge of the Doves 30 Jul 2013 | 10:46 pm
The recent WSJ article on the relative forecasting results of some of the Fed’s hawks and doves stirred some old memories regarding the hawk/dove divide. I got an unfair reputation as a dove back in 1...
Good News For A Change: Real GDP Revised Down 26 Jun 2013 | 08:48 pm
The third estimate of the first quarter real GDP came in at an annual rate of 1.8 percent, down from a second estimate of 2.4 percent and a first estimate of 2.5 percent. It looks as though our two pe...
Known Unknowns 21 Jun 2013 | 12:03 am
Writing about unknown unknowns would be more interesting, but I don’t know what they are. Instead, I will focus here on some unknowns that have been bothering me. Most have to do more or less with the...
Bank Reserves: A Hot Potato 23 May 2013 | 02:26 am
During the Q&A following Chairman Bernanke’s testimony before the Joint Economic Committee today, Senator Sanders said he was preparing legislation to prohibit the payment of interest on excess reserv...
Money Hoarding Versus Reserve Hoarding 17 May 2013 | 02:26 am
Jesse Eisinger, in a provocative article in today’s New York Times, purportedly summarizes an argument on Fed policy between hedge fund managers and economists. “After several such managers at a recen...
Foreign Trade’s Impact on GDP 6 May 2013 | 12:51 am
The treatment of foreign trade statistics in the GDP estimates is tricky, confusing, and may contribute to an unwarranted aversion to imports. The reason is that we add categories of spending to get t...
Real GDP Up; Real Final Sales Down/Was the Economy Stronger or Weaker in the First Quarter? 28 Apr 2013 | 09:13 pm
Casual consumers of economic data, i.e. normal people, probably understand instinctively that the details behind the headline numbers matter. However, they can at least rest assured that such a large ...
Falling Inflation Takes Gold Down With It 16 Apr 2013 | 11:39 pm
This morning we learned that the Consumer Price Index declined at a 0.2% annual rate in March for an increase of 1.5% over the past year. Last week we learned that the Producer Price Index declined 0....
The Fed Has Not Been Printing Boatloads of Money 22 Mar 2013 | 02:02 am
As I listen to commentary on cable TV about the Fed’s quantitative easing, I find it amazing that people smarter than I, as well as better trained and more knowledgeable about many things, keep making...
How Fracking Can Reduce the Budget Deficit 4 Mar 2013 | 09:34 pm
The direct way fracking can reduce the budget is by stimulating economic activity and thus tax revenues. This is obvious. This piece is about another, less obvious, less intuitive, indirect way fracki...
