The University of California may say I’m just taking a few days off. That’s not how I see it.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Car sales up, but for how long?
August auto sales provided the strongest signal of an economic rebound that we’ve seen yet. But August is so yesterday.
Econbrowser Emoticon shifts to neutral
| Date | Status |
|---|---|
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Sep 13, 2006 |
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| Feb 21, 2007 | 
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| Apr 25, 2007 | 
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| Jun 27, 2007 |
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| Oct 5, 2007 |
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| Jan 4, 2008 |
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| Aug 30, 2009 |
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If you’ve only been following Econbrowser since 2008, you may have thought that the crabby countenance in the upper-right corner of our main page was a permanent fixture, conveying our general grumpiness about the state of the economy or perhaps life in general. Despite having been stuck in the pessimistic mode for quite some time now, the emoticon was in fact always intended to be a dynamic feature, adjusted from time to time to provide readers with our overall impression of incoming data. The table on the left provides links to each occasion that our Little Econ Watcher’s countenance has changed in the past.
Last week’s data persuaded me to move the Econbrowser Emoticon back into neutral, signifying that I now judge overall output to be growing slowly rather than declining. Here are details on the evidence that prompted this change in assessment, and what it signifies.
$9 trillion– what, me worry?
Paul Krugman may not be that concerned by the Obama administration’s new projection that the unified federal budget deficits will sum to $9 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. But I am.
Good news on house prices
I was happy and surprised to see that the nominal
S&P/Case-Shiller seasonally adjusted Home Price Index rose by 0.75% in June for a composite of 20 U.S. metropolitan areas.
The market-perceived monetary policy rule
Stanford Professor John Taylor has suggested that monetary policy could be summarized in terms of a simple rule, lowering interest rates when output is too low and raising them when inflation is too high. A number of academic papers have investigated this rule from the perspective of describing what the Federal Reserve has historically done. In a new paper co-authored with Federal Reserve economist Seth Pruitt and Office of Immigration Statistics economist Scott Borger, I take a look at what monetary policy rule the market perceived the Fed to be following over different historical periods.
The Road Ahead for the Fed
Tom Keene has been doing a series for Bloomberg Radio this week on the new book, The Road Ahead for the Fed. You can listen to Tom’s interviews with me or three of the other authors who contributed to the book by clicking on a link below.
Replay of 1930?
We know the glass is both half empty and half full. But the real question is whether liquid is being added in or draining out.
Current economic conditions
This was another week when everybody but me sees an economic recovery in the works.
Paying for design flaws
Updates on what this is going to cost you and me.