This morning we were pleased to welcome Janet Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, to our UCSD Economics Roundtable. She focused on three main challenges: the housing slump, financial market turmoil, and commodity prices, which she likened to the three witches from Macbeth. Her complete speech is available from the FRB SFO Here are some excerpts.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Links for July 3
Today we outsource with some interesting links on oil markets and housing.
Recession and the oil shock of 2008
Unfortunately, this seems to be unfolding according to script.
Lecture on regional business cycles
The lecture I gave at the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics Symposium in San Francisco two months ago on regional business cycles (earlier summarized here and
here) is now available via video streaming (courtesy of Bruce Mizrach and the SNDE). Note you have to click through the slides yourself as the lecture proceeds, and it seems to work with Internet Explorer but not Firefox.
Play chess like the pros
While I’m on the subject of the benefits of slowing down I should perhaps mention this hilarious chess game between grandmasters Maxim Dlugy and Hikaru Nakamura.
Endless winter
As noted by Calculated Risk, global warming or no, the spring selling season for new homes never seemed to arrive this year.
Kling’s question on oil speculation
Arnold Kling poses a question for Paul Krugman. Here’s how I would answer.
Calculating your savings from slowing down
Ironman has developed a neat tool that allows you to input your vehicle’s typical mileage and then calculate how much money you’re likely to save on a particular trip by driving slower. Pretty cool!
How big a contribution could oil speculation be making?
A key reason why oil prices have been going up is that Asia and the oil producing countries are consuming more while global oil production has stagnated. That means Europe and America had to consume less, and a very high price proved necessary to accomplish that.
I do believe that speculation has been another factor that contributed to recent high oil prices. However, a key element of the bubble story is that there needs to be a very limited response of quantity demanded to the price increases, which the most recent data persuade me is no longer the case. Some of the estimates I’ve been hearing of the size of the contribution speculation is currently making to the price are therefore difficult to defend. Here I explain why, essentially elaborating on Paul Krugman’s theme.
Saudi oil production increases
The recently announced Saudi oil production increases are more modest than had been suggested in some of the earlier rumors. The Oil Drum ([1],[2]) is your source for the meaning of the latest announcements.