IMF research economist
Prakash Loungani reports some statistics on the extent to which housing price declines are being seen worldwide.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Shadowstats responds
Last month I called attention to an analysis by BLS researchers John Greenlees and Robert McClelland of some of the claims by John Williams of Shadowstats about the consequences for reported inflation of assorted technical decisions made by the BLS. Williams asked me to update with a link to his response to the BLS study. I am happy to do so, along with offering some further observations of my own.
Balance sheet of the Federal Reserve
I was astonished when I heard that the Fed is contemplating
increasing the Term Auction Facility to $900 billion. I wanted to take another look at the ever-changing balance sheet of the Fed to see how logistically Bernanke might be able to perform such a feat.
Roundtable discussion on the financial crisis
I participated on Friday with several other UCSD faculty members (including Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz) in a discussion about the current economic crisis. If you have RealPlayer, you can view the discussion here, though I recommend fast-forwarding to skip the first 8 introductory minutes to get to the actual discussion. If you just want my slides, I’ve posted them here.
The downturn worsens
UCLA Professor Ed Leamer recently proposed four criteria for determining whether the economy is in recession, and concluded at the time of his study (two months ago) that the U.S. had not yet crossed that threshold. But this week’s data might cause him to change his mind.
Updating euro-area GDP forecasts
Here I relate some interesting new research on how to update economic forecasts with incoming daily data and the latest assessment of where things stand in Europe.
Auto sales deteriorate further
U.S. auto sales have been dismal for most of this year. And they just took a turn for the worse.
Real GDP likely fell in Q3
Calculated Risk observes that we already know the values for a significant chunk of 2008:Q3 GDP. And it doesn’t look good.
Detroit gets in on the action
With all the excitement in financial markets, I almost missed this story on the bailout for automakers.
Understanding the TED spread
One measure that is being used to summarize the strain in financial markets is the TED spread. This is calculated as the gap between 3-month LIBOR (an average of interest rates offered in the London interbank market for 3-month dollar-denominated loans) and the 3-month Treasury bill rate. The size of this gap presumably reflects some sort of risk or liquidity premium. I was interested to break the TED spread down into identifiable components to try to get a better understanding of what may be responsible for its recent behavior.