Today Econbrowser is pleased to host this guest contribution from Steven Kopits, who heads the New York office of Douglas-Westwood, energy business consultants.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
It’s not just Europe
I see many financial commentators bravely trying to explain recent ups and downs in asset and commodity prices in terms of news coming out of Europe. But a Eurocentric perspective misses an important part of the story.
Calling recessions in real time
My latest research paper reviews efforts to supplement the declarations by the National Bureau of Economic Research as to the beginning and ending of economic recessions with determinations made by purely mechanical algorithms.
San Diego economy outlook
The San Diego Daily Transcript invited me to join a group of economists in discussing prospects for the local economy. You can watch the discussion in a series of videos:
Europe and the world economy
Since mid-April, the euro has depreciated 10% against the U.S. dollar and European stocks have lost 17% of their value. But markets aren’t acting as though the problems will be confined to Europe.
Inflation, taxation, and the underground economy
University of Maryland Professor Boragan Aruoba (of the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Business Conditions Index fame) has an interesting new paper that offers another perspective on the challenges facing Europe.
The European bailout
As Europe and the IMF announce close to a trillion dollar rescue package, Megan McArdle asks, what’s the benefit to the countries providing the funding? Here are my thoughts.
Staying sane in a crazy market
For a few exciting minutes on Thursday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average was down a thousand points, with some major stocks momentarily falling to a penny a share. The basic story appears to be as follows. Initial strong selling in some stocks such as Procter & Gamble led the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading temporarily in a few stocks until specialists could sort out what was going on. But trading in those stocks continued on other exchanges, where as a result of their thinner books, orders to sell at any price went far down the list of existing buy bids. These lower prices triggered further automatic selling that sent some stocks all the way through the list of outstanding bids until encountering basement bids at one cent a share.
One popular meme is to attribute these fireworks to the existence of multiple trading venues that didn’t all get shut down simultaneously (e.g.,
WSJ or NYT). But I think we should also be taking a closer look at the folks who were sending the sell orders rather than just blaming the exchanges for carrying out the instructions they received.
How much damage does the market think the oil spill has done?
Econbrowser is pleased to host this guest contribution from UCSD Ph.D. candidate Ben Fissel, who shares a quick estimate of the economic damage from the Gulf oil spill.
The sluggish recovery
This week we received more evidence confirming that the U.S. economy has returned to positive, but still disappointing, growth.