Mortgage buyer and insurer Fannie Mae was in the news again this week.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
The soaring stock market
Broad market indicators like the S&P500 have been making all-time nominal highs. What’s the significance of that for investors and the economy?
R&D and benchmark revisions of GDP for Robinson Crusoe
Beginning with the third quarter of this year, the BEA plans to report the U.S. GDP and national income accounts on a new basis. One of the purposes of the change is to better reflect the importance of intellectual capital and technological innovation in the modern economy. These changes are expected to cause the reported value of GDP to be about 3% higher than when calculated under the present system. I have been thinking about how I would explain these changes to an undergraduate economics class, and this is what I came up with.
Links for 2013-05-01
Quick links to a few items I found of interest:
- The Congressional Budget Office has prepared informative slides summarizing the U.S. fiscal situation (via Business Insider)
- Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers referee the Reinhart-Rogoff debate (via Free Exchange)
- Herndon, Ash, and Pollin appear to have been using faulty data for New Zealand
- Bill McBride reviews the U.S. decline in vehicle miles driven
- China’s oil imports are down relative to this point last year (via Steven Kopits)
The contributions of Reinhart and Rogoff
With all the heated discussions of the last two weeks, it is important to keep perspective on which issues are in dispute and which are not. Let me state plainly something on which I think we ought to be agreed: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is a valuable work of scholarship that continues to deserve study and praise from any thinking person. Here I review some of my reasons for saying that.
Another mediocre GDP report: is this the new normal?
The BEA released today its estimate of 2013 first-quarter real GDP, which grew at a 2.5% annual rate from the previous quarter. That’s below the average 3.1% growth rate since World War II, but better than the 2.1% average since the recovery began in 2009:Q3.
Reinhart-Rogoff and Herndon-Ash-Pollin: a few further comments
I made some comments on Sunday about a recent critique by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of an influential 2010 paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Yesterday Econbrowser hosted a
reply from Pollin and Ash to my remarks. Here I would like to add a few further thoughts on this discussion.
Reply to Prof. Hamilton regarding “Reinhart-Rogoff Data Problems”
Today Econbrowser hosts this guest contribution from Robert Pollin and Michael Ash of the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Reinhart-Rogoff data problems
The methods and conclusions of an influential paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published in 2010 have recently been challenged by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Here I comment on both the details and broader significance of the dispute.
Growing student debt
I was curious to take a look at the growing student debt load and the government’s exposure to potential repayment issues.