Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
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Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Supply cuts lift oil prices
The price of crude oil has had some sharp swings over the last month. But the trend since January has clearly been up.
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Fed tightening cycles
Last December the Fed began what it thought at the time was a new cycle of tightening. Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s statements last week suggest the Fed still sees this plan as underway. A comparison with historical tightening cycles sheds some light on why so far the Fed hasn’t followed through.
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Too systemic to fail
Bryan Kelly at the University of Chicago, Hanno Lustig at Stanford and Stijn van Nieuwerburgh at NYU had an interesting paper in the June issue of American Economic Review that used option prices to measure the magnitude of the implicit U.S. government guarantee of the financial sector during 2007-2009.
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Why you should never use the Hodrick-Prescott filter
A common problem in economics is that most of the variables we study have trends. Even the simplest statistics like the mean and variance aren’t meaningful descriptions of such variables. One popular approach is to remove the trend using the Hodrick-Prescott filter. I’ve just finished a new research paper highlighting the problems with this approach and suggesting what I believe is a better alternative.
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Anemic economic growth
The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that U.S. real GDP grew at a 1.2% annual rate in the second quarter. Not good news.
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Helicopter money
Despite aggressive actions by central banks, many of the world’s economies are still stagnating and facing new shocks, leading to renewed calls for helicopter money as a serious policy prescription for countries like Japan and the U.K.. And, if things go badly, maybe the United States?
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Markets post-Brexit
U.S. stock prices fell more than 5% in the two-day aftermath of the British vote to leave the European Union. But equities have since regained those losses and are back near all-time highs.
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Economic consequences of Brexit
Here are my two pence on some of the consequences of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.
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Trends in oil supply and demand
Here I review key trends in the oil market over the last decade.
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