The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that U.S. real GDP grew at a 0.5% annual rate in the first quarter. That’s disappointing, even by standards of the weak growth that has become the norm since getting out of the Great Recession.
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Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Causes and consequences of the oil price decline of 2014-2015
At the NBER Annual Conference on Macroeconomics in Cambridge last week I participated with Steven Kamin of the Federal Reserve Board and Steven Strongin of Goldman Sachs in a discussion on commodity prices. You can watch a video of our discussion at the NBER web site.
A financial hockey stick
Yesterday I was at the 31st annual NBER conference on macroeconomics (along with fellow blogger Mark Thoma). Among the many interesting contributions was development of an extended data set on 25 different indicators for 17 advanced economies going back to 1870 by Jorda, Schularick and Taylor (2016).
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Why no economic boost from lower oil prices?
Many analysts had anticipated that a dramatic drop in oil prices such as we’ve seen since the summer of 2014 could provide a big stimulus to the economy of a net oil importer like the United States. That doesn’t seem to be what we’ve observed in the data.
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2016 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge winner
Congratulations to Jackiegee, winner of the 2016 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge. None of our entrants correctly picked the tournament winner to be Villanova, but Jackie (like a number of others of you) thought it would be UNC, and came within half a second of being right! For fans of Michigan State, West Virginia, and others, better luck next year!
Productivity gains in U.S. shale oil
Horizontal fracturing of tight hydrocarbon-bearing formations was responsible for a phenomenal resurgence in U.S. oil production, which rose more than 4 million barrels per day from 2010 levels before peaking in April of last year.
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Uber efficiency
Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are using a vastly more efficient technology for matching people who want a ride with people who want to drive them than was available when the taxi radio dispatch systems were set up in the 1940s.
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Recent moves in oil prices
Today I discuss the factors that brought oil prices so far down and more recently back up.
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2016 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge
Sign up for the world famous ninth annual Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge, in which Econbrowsers are invited to demonstrate their inability to predict the outcome of the U.S. college mens’ basketball tournament. It’s almost as much glory as winning Warren Buffett’s competing pool, but don’t worry, you can enter both! If you want to participate, go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven’t used that site before, and fill in your bracket before Thursday at noon.
Forward guidance
According to economic theory, one of the most promising ways in which monetary policy might be able to stimulate an economy in which the nominal interest rate has reached zero is to promise to follow a different policy rule once interest rates are again positive. A commitment to more stimulus and inflation in the future regime could in principle influence expectations and actions of people in the economy today, and thereby offer a means by which the central bank could help an economy recover from the zero lower bound. But as a practical matter, how does the Fed communicate to the public at date t something it intends to do at some future date t+h?
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