Here I provide some more background on the relation between oil price increases and economic recessions.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Initial claims for unemployment insurance
The Labor Department reported today that initial claims for unemployment insurance rose by 27,000 in the most recent available week. Although that’s a disappointing development, it’s still a small enough increase to allow the 4-week average to fall for the second week in a row. Since that declining 4-week average is one of the few encouraging pieces of news in an otherwise discouraging economic landscape, I wanted to take a closer look at just how significant a statistical signal it really sends.
Robert DeYoung on payday loans
I thought this was an interesting editorial in Tuesday’s WSJ.
Update on the latest economic indicators
Some good news, some bad, in the indicators we follow this week.
The Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Business Conditions Index
Last weekend I attended an excellent conference on business cycles hosted by UC Riverside (program details here). Among the many interesting presentations was an update from University of Maryland Professor Boragan Aruoba on the index of current business conditions that he developed with Professor Frank Diebold of the University of Pennsylvania and Federal Reserve economist Chiara Scotti.
Mortgage fraud
Why sell crack when taking money from a careless lender is so much easier and more profitable?
Initial unemployment claims and the end of recessions
Fed Chair Ben Bernanke a few weeks ago said he saw some green shoots
of favorable developments in financial markets. Does today’s Labor Department report that the seasonally adjusted number of initial claims for unemployment insurance fell by 20,000 workers in the most recent week constitute another?
Some useful resources
Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (paper here) document the usefulness of Google Trends and Google Insights for Search for purposes of updating assessments of current economic magnitudes. I see that Mark Thoma also calls attention to this intriguing data source.
Scott Irwin has collected an archive with some of the difficult-to-find classics in commodity research.
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge Winner
Congratulations to King Steve, the winner of the
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge, and to phuphighter, who came in a close second.
March auto sales
Light vehicles sold in the U.S. last month were down 37% from March 2008, whereas February sales had been 41% below year-earlier values. Does a February-to-March increase and smaller year-over-year drop mean that we’ve turned the corner?