- NY Fed economist Erkko Etula finds that he can predict oil prices using the volume of broker-dealer financial assets.
- Washington University Professor James Morley and separately Kansas City Fed economist Todd Clark haven’t given up on the Great Moderation.
- My colleague Eli Berman discusses his book Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism
- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may seek an increase to their $400 billion federal lifeline before the end of the year.
- Billy Hallowell puts together a blog carnival on Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances.
- Berkeley Professor Petr HoYava proposes a new theory of gravity.
Yearly Archives: 2009
How High Do Income Elasticities Have to Be to Explain the Recent Import Drop-off?
There’s been a debate over the cause of the trade flow drop-off, with varying explanations being offered. Broadly speaking, the explanations are (1) trade credit and credit crunch more broadly, (2) enhanced vertical specialization implying higher income elasticities, and (3) compositional effects (the trade dependent sectors were those most highly affected in the latest recession). Without necessarily offering definitive evidence one way or the other, I wanted to quantify the extent to which income elasticities had to be higher in order to rationalize the movements observed in US data.
Should the Fed be the nation’s bubble fighter?
That’s a question recently taken up by
the Wall Street Journal. Here are my thoughts.
College football playoffs
Employment Bounceback?
From Peter Hooper, Torsten Slok, Christine Dobridge, “Robust growth needed to avoid jobless recovery,” Deutsche Bank Global Economic Perspectives (Dec. 9) [not online]:
Commodity prices and the Fed
I’ve been discussing possible explanations for the recent tendency of the dollar prices of commodities to move together. On Friday we received a very useful data point for distinguishing between the different hypotheses.
Exchange Rate Policies
My colleague Charles Engel has a new paper circulated by the Dallas Fed entitled “Exchange Rate Policies”, which brings theory to bear on the topic. From the introduction:
Deficit links
Some quick excerpts of what others are saying.
The Employment Situation in Graphs
…and an initial read on monthly GDP.
