Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

At Long Last, the Feared (Portfolio) Crowding Out Has Materialized

The implication of a (massive) revision to the expected path of government debt relative to baseline is an increase in the slope of the yield curve. Some portion comes from the expectations hypothesis of the term structure, some from an increase in the risk premium. [lecture notes on portfolio crowding out] [lecture notes on expectations hypothesis of term structure]

yieldcurve_8_9nov16

Figure 1: Yield curve as of 8 November (blue), and 9 November (green). Source: US Treasury.

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The Trilemma, Nuanced

I’ve just finished up the Mundell-Fleming model in my int’l finance course, and ended the section with a discussion of the “International Trilemma”, also known as “the Impossible Trinity”, which states that a given country can at any given time fully achieve only two out of three objectives of exchange rate stability, monetary autonomy, and financial integration (full capital mobility) at a time.

trilemma

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“The Election: Implications for Policy Change?”

That’s the title of an informal panel at the UW La Follette School of Public Affairs on Tuesday. Here are the slides that underpin my presentation.

For now, let the following figure summarize the choices.
clinton_trump_macro

Source: “Trump vs Clinton: Polarization & uncertainty,” Research Briefing (Oxford Economics, 19 Sept. 2016) [not online].

The other panelists are Pam Herd, Greg Nemet, Rourke O’Brien, and Tim Smeeding.