The International Energy Agency announced on Thursday that its 28 member countries had agreed to release 60 million barrels from their combined strategic stockpiles. The U.S. plans to contribute half of this total, all in the form of sweet crude. Thirty million barrels represents about 10% of the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve of 293 million barrels of sweet crude oil, and about 4% of the entire 727 million barrels stockpiled in the U.S. SPR.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Making jobs priority one
It is looking unlikely that there will be more stimulus from either fiscal policy or monetary policy. Former President Bill Clinton has called for suggestions for other policy options that might be helpful. Here are a few ideas along those lines.
Monetary policy since 2000
I just returned from the annual conference of the
Society for Financial Econometrics
hosted by the University of Chicago. One of the many interesting papers described changes in Federal Reserve policy over time.
A game of chicken
Making a political game out of the debt ceiling is playing with fire.
Links for 2011-06-13
Some items I found interesting:
- Tyler Cowen outlines what I see as the responsible approach to the U.S. federal fiscal challenges: slow the growth of government spending.
- Some undergraduates at Rutgers University have developed a nice site to track economic indicators. And Bill McBride has an invaluable summary of which ones really matter.
- From the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: Oil and the Macroeconomy in a Changing World: A Conference Summary.
- The Office of Personnel Management on shifting costs of Postal Service retirement funding to U.S. taxpayers.
- And Glenn Reynolds warns beware of bimbots.
Chinese oil demand
Stuart Staniford notes that the number of trucks and passenger vehicles in China has been growing at about 23% each year.
The significance of OPEC announcements
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) today announced that its members could not reach an agreement to change OPEC’s production quotas. How significant is that announcement? In my opinion, not very.
Life without QE2
Last November, the Federal Reserve announced a plan to purchase $75 billion each month in intermediate-term Treasury securities, a measure popularly described as a second round of quantitative easing, or QE2. June is the last month of this program, and it looks unlikely that the Fed will extend it, causing some observers to be concerned. My view is that QE2 had relatively modest effects, and such benefits as it provided should not evaporate with the end of the purchases.
Debt ceiling politics
Here’s a link to an interview with a local TV station.
A weakening economy
Incoming data over the last two weeks paint a consistent picture that the U.S. economy, which had been growing at a disappointingly slow rate, has weakened further.