The BEA released today its estimate of 2012 fourth-quarter real GDP, which declined slightly from the third quarter. How scary is that?
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Links for 2013-01-23
Quick links to a few items I found of interest.
A long-run perspective on the U.S. deficit and debt
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis economist Daniel Thornton has a new paper looking at long-run factors in the U.S. deficit and debt. His graphs tell a familiar story, but one worth repeating.
Debt-ceiling economics and politics
Let me outsource this topic to some others who’ve said it better than I could.
The near-term U.S. fiscal situation
Here I briefly survey some recent developments.
Understanding risk aversion in financial markets
At the economics meetings here in San Diego this weekend, I learned about some very interesting new research on one of the core questions in finance and macroeconomics that had long puzzled me.
QE3 and beyond
Now that we’ve closed the books on 2012, I thought it might be useful to take a look at where monetary policy has led us over the last four years.
Investment and the business cycle
I fell a little behind on blogging with the holidays, so today I’ll outsource to Calculated Risk.
Future production from U.S. shale or tight oil
I attended the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco two weeks ago at which I heard a very interesting presentation by David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute. He is more pessimistic about future production potential from U.S. shale gas and tight oil formations than some other analysts. Here I report some of the data on tight oil production that led to his conclusion.
U.S. government profits from AIG bailout
A key player in the financial crisis was insurance giant AIG, which sold a huge volume of credit default swaps supposedly protecting buyers of mortgage-backed securities from losses due to default. But AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to honor these guarantees when things went bad, and much of AIG’s liabilities ended up being picked up by the Fed and the Treasury. On Tuesday the U.S. Treasury announced that it had sold the last of the common shares in AIG that it had acquired as compensation for its emergency assistance to AIG and reported that the Treasury and the Fed had together earned a profit of $22.7 billion as a result of their assistance to AIG. I was curious to take a look at how this story ended up having a happy ending.