Today I outsource to a couple of links I found interesting:
Dave Cohen on oil prices.
Stephen Gordon on economists’ fatal flaw.
James Morley on the need for a new Fed-Treasury accord.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Federal Reserve balance sheet
Here I survey how we got here, where things currently stand, and what it all means.
Fiscal stimulus: the case for block grants
A few thoughts on how the federal government might best implement a fiscal stimulus.
The other shoe begins to drop
Chrysler LLC, awaiting a federal rescue as its cash dwindles, will shut all 30 of its plants for at least a month starting Dec. 19 as unsold cars and trucks pile up at showrooms.
Ford Motor Co. said it will idle most of its North American assembly plants for the first week of January, while General Motors Corp. said a new factory making engines for the Chevrolet Volt electric car is being delayed to conserve cash.
The cutbacks showed how far automakers are going to save money and prune output in a year in which industrywide U.S. sales are poised to fall to their lowest levels since 1991. GM and Chrysler say they may run out of operating funds in just weeks without emergency U.S. aid.
Quantitative easing
Today’s announcement from the Federal Reserve marks the end of the road for Plan A (fighting the recession by lowering interest rates), and the beginning of … what?
Finding the exit
How you think we might get out of our current economic problems has something to do with how you think we got into them in the first place.
John Taylor on the Federal Reserve
Stanford economics professor John Taylor has a new paper in which he takes aim at recent economic policy, and fires with both barrels, concluding that “government actions and interventions caused, prolonged, and worsened the financial crisis.”
Predicting the trough and a jobless recovery
Michael Dueker is a senior portfolio strategist at Russell Investments and formerly was an assistant vice president in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Michael is also a member of the Blue Chip forecasting panel.
In early February 2008, Michael submitted a piece to Econbrowser that correctly predicted the onset of the current recession, using a model-based forecast.
We are pleased that that he is now presenting forecasts from the same Qual VAR model concerning the recession’s trough date and the magnitude of a jobless recovery to follow, subject to the disclaimer that the content is the responsibility of the author and does not represent official positions of Russell Investments
and does not constitute investment advice.
Comparing recessions
Last week was a tough one for the optimists.
The auto downturn is very serious
I was running out of vocabulary last month to describe just how bad October was for the domestic automakers. But whatever you want to say about October, November was significantly worse.