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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Author Archives: James_Hamilton
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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Dueling nowcasts
The second quarter of 2016 is now more than half over, but we won’t receive the first reading on 2016:Q2 GDP from the BEA until the end of July. A forecast of something that is happening right now is sometimes described as a “nowcast”. The Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta are providing a valuable service by publishing continuously updated nowcasts of GDP. But what should we do if they’re giving us rather different numbers?
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Expectations of inflation
The FOMC and professional forecasters expect the Fed eventually to achieve its 2% inflation target. The market seems more skeptical.
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Another weak quarter for U.S. GDP
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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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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