New state level employment data, benchmarked through September 2017, released yesterday indicate the manufacturing employment surge reported last year has been erased, as I predicted in this post. The October-January data do not incorporate additional information from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
Larry Kudlow Forecasts
Mr. Kudlow is apparently on the short list for new National Economic Committee chair. Maybe a good time to review some of his macro predictions.
Figure 1: Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index, s.a., deflated by CPI-all (blue, left scale), and real GDP, bn. Ch.2009$ SAAR (black, right scale). NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Red line at 20 June 2005 comment on housing bubble, and pink line at 7 December 2007 on recession. Source: S&P, BLS via FRED, BEA (2017Q4 2nd release), NBER, and author’s calculations.
Assessing Trends in Real Shares
Justin Fox has a excellent discussion on the problems in conveying trends in real activity in relative terms when the real magnitudes are expressed in chain weighted terms.
The New Fama Puzzle, post-ZLB
In a previous post, I documented the fact that the Fama puzzle had transformed post-global financial crisis, so that for most currency pairs, interest rate differentials pointed in the right direction for subsequent exchange rate depreciation, from 2006 through end-2015 (Bussiere, Chinn, Ferrara, Heipertz (2018)). Here I show that the new puzzle persists through the end of 2017, a period when US interest rates were rising.
Wisconsin, Trade and Section 232
I was interviewed on the weekly newsmagazine Here and Now today about Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum:
Regarding Wisconsin, cheese was not on the Hit List, but motorcycles and cranberries were.
Some Steel Sector Indicators
which should give you pause for thought about national-security-rationalized tariffs. Output stable, real prices up.
Nearly 35 Years of Daily EPU Data, Plotted
Ed Hanson asserts that by showing a plot of monthly data constructed as an average of daily data, I am changing the message of the data. In order to assure people that the Trilateral Commission/the Illuminati/CigaretteSmokingMan haven’t “gotten to me” to manipulate the data, I’m going to show permutations of the Baker/Bloom/Davis Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) data, news based index.
Is Trump “Special”? Economic Policy Uncertainty Levels in Perspective
The answer is “yes”.
Economic Policy Uncertainty and Risk Indices: March 5, 2018
Remember those quaint notions of policy uncertainty holding back growth? Well, what to make of recent moves in uncertainty and risk indices, given all the talk of trade wars?
Figure 1: US daily Economic Policy Uncertainty index from Baker, Bloom and Davis (dark blue), and seven day centered moving average (red). Orange shading denotes Trump Administration. Source: policyuncertainty.com, and author’s calculations.
An Event Study: How Do Equity Markets View National Security-based Trade Protection?
Figure 1: Dow Jones, 15 minute increments. Source: TradingEconomics.