Last week I puzzled over the response of financial markets to the U.S. election. Since the election, the S&P500 is now up 3%, the dollar is up 4.6% against the euro, and most remarkable of all, the 10-year Treasury rate has gone up 50 basis points. Here I offer some further thoughts on the last development.
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Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Mr. Trump and the markets
I was astounded not only by the outcome of the U.S. presidential election but also by the response of financial markets.
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Links for 2016-11-13
Three papers of interest on the effects of U.S. trade policy on manufacturing employment, racial discrimination, and the Chinese real estate boom.
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New data sources for economic research
One of the exciting implications for economists of the digitization of everything is the ability to study economic relations and behavior at a level of detail far beyond anything that could have been attempted a decade ago. I’ve earlier called attention here to new measures of inflation obtained from millions of prices posted on the web, new insights into pricing behavior coming from scanner data on individual store transactions, and understanding of consumer behavior based on debit and credit transactions of 25 million Americans. Here I discuss another new study based on smart-phone apps.
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Q3 GDP
The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced yesterday that U.S. real GDP grew at a 2.9% annual rate in the second quarter. That’s below the historical average U.S. growth rate of 3.1% per year. Even so, this was the best report in the last two years.
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U.S. elections
The most valuable resource for tracking the U.S. elections is Nate Silver’s 538.
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OPEC production cut
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday:
OPEC said its members agreed that they need to cut crude output to reduce the world’s supply glut, a shift for the 14-member group that was enough to send oil prices higher, even though reaching a deal remains far from certain.
Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said they reached an understanding after a six-hour gathering in the Algerian capital, but deferred until November the fraught task of finalizing a plan to make those cuts. OPEC officials said a committee would be formed to determine how much each country would have to cut and then report to the group at its next meeting on Nov. 30 in Vienna.
Why didn’t the recent oil price decline help the U.S. economy more?
Christiane Baumeister and Lutz Kilian presented an interesting paper at the Brookings Institution last week that takes a detailed look at the effects on the U.S. economy of the dramatic oil price decline of 2014-2015.
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Links for 2016-09-11
Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
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Supply cuts lift oil prices
The price of crude oil has had some sharp swings over the last month. But the trend since January has clearly been up.
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