Author Archives: James_Hamilton

2015 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge

It’s time to get ready for the world famous eighth annual Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge, in which readers and friends of our blog are invited to demonstrate their skill (or luck) at predicting the outcome of the U.S. college mens’ basketball tournament. 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 some time between Sunday at 7:00 p.m. EDT and Thursday before noon.

The big question is whether anybody can beat Kentucky?

Is the United States Protected from the European Debt Crisis?

For those of you in San Diego I wanted to call attention to a roundtable discussion this Friday March 6 on some of the ongoing concerns about European sovereign debt. I’ll be appearing along with Jeffrey Frieden from Harvard (who will be quite familiar to regular readers of Econbrowser) and David Leblang of the University of Virginia. Details on how to register for the event can be found here.

What is the new normal for the real interest rate?

The yield on a 10-year Treasury inflation protected security was negative through much of 2012 and 2013, and remains today below 0.25%. Have we entered a new era in which a real rate near zero is the new normal? That’s the subject of a new paper that I just completed with Ethan Harris, head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Jan Hatzius chief economist of Goldman Sachs, and Kenneth West professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, which we presented at the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum annual conference in New York on Friday.
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Sovereign debt scares– is the U.S. immune?

Many people are finally coming to a realization that should have been evident long ago: Greece’s debts are not going to be repaid. And as discussion turns to who might be next, it seems a good time to revisit the question of whether the United States could some day find itself in similar trouble. I am substantially more optimistic about this than I was a couple of years ago, and here is why.
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What’s driving the price of oil down?

In December I provided some simple calculations of the extent to which a slowdown in the growth of global oil demand may have contributed to the spectacular drop in oil prices since last summer, and I updated those estimates two weeks ago. Some of you have suggested that as conditions keep changing, perhaps I should update those calculations every week. Thanks to the always-helpful Ironman at Political Calculations, I can now go that a step better, and provide eager Econbrowser readers a quick tool they can use to update these calculations on their own on a daily basis, if your heart so desires.

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