I am a little slow responding to the stunning revision to the first-quarter GDP estimates that came out two weeks ago, but here are my thoughts about the new estimates.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Gasoline prices in perspective
Many reporters have been pushing the meme that:
Consumers will pay the highest Fourth of July gasoline prices in six years.
Energy and the economy 30 years later
Also at the meeting of the International Association for Energy Economics last week I was honored to receive an award from the association for outstanding contributions to the profession. Here are the remarks I made at the awards banquet.
Energy demand and GDP
Last week I was at the annual meeting of the International Association for Energy Economics in New York City. One of the many interesting presentations was by Professor David Stern of Australian National University describing his research with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Maria del Mar Rubio Varas developing some stylized facts about energy and economic growth.
Gasoline price calculator
What do recent developments in Iraq imply for the price U.S. motorists should expect to pay for gasoline?
Iraq, oil markets, and the U.S. economy
The group is calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. And so it may come to be.
Links for 2014-06-11
Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
Negative interest rates
The European Central Bank announced on Thursday that it is moving interest rates into negative territory, charging banks for maintaining deposits with the ECB rather than paying the banks positive interest. The hope is that lower (now even negative) interest rates may provide some stimulus to the European economy which might help bring European inflation closer to the ECB’s 2% target. Here I offer a few thoughts on this move.
Educating Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong writes:
Department of “Huh?!”–I Don’t Understand More and More of Piketty’s Critics: Per Krusell and Tony Smith
As time passes, it seems to me that a larger and larger fraction of Piketty’s critics are making arguments that really make no sense at all– that I really do not understand how people can believe them, or why anybody would think that anybody else would believe them. Today we have Per Krusell and Tony Smith assuming that the economy-wide capital depreciation rate δ is not 0.03 or 0.05 but 0.1–and it does make a huge difference.
Let me do my best to try to educate Brad.
Commodity prices and resource scarcity
How has the world managed to increase both population and living standards on a finite planet?