Policy uncertainty, as measured by the Baker, Bloom and Davis index, is skyrocketing.
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
The State of Energy Markets in Mid-October
Who Knows?
Flying Blind
The House Republicans’ insistence on keeping the government closed means [0] that it is likely that we will be conducting macroeconomic policymaking with increasingly sparse or mismeasured data. If one doesn’t believe in expertise and information, then this is not a problem. If one believes that knowledge should inform decisionmaking, it is.
Movements in Short Term Treasurys
“Short-term U.S. debt prices tumbled again Tuesday amid rising investor concern about the prospect of a government-debt default, sending the yield on one-month U.S. Treasury bills to its highest level since the financial crisis.”
Measuring the Trilemma: Updated Indices
Jérémie Cohen-Setton has a nice review of the recent blog-literature regarding the trilemma on Bruegel:
Don’t Eat the Shrimp!
(Update 10/8, 9PM)
Or think twice … thanks to the government closure.
From GovExec, “90 Percent of Seafood Imports Go Uninspected Due to Shutdown”:
Estimated Macro Impacts of the Shutdown
(Updated 10/6)
Four business days into the shutdown, and we have already exceeded in length 90% of the government-wide shutdowns that have occurred. What is the macro impact? In an accounting sense, by end-of-Monday, the impact should be to shave off 0.2 ppts of 2013Q4 q/q annualized growth.
The September Employment Situation
[This empty webpage brought to you courtesy of the House of Representatives]
Debt Ceiling Watch (III)
Lots of pooh-poohing of the implications of a debt-ceiling crisis. It’s instructive to examine what happened to equity markets when we last came close to a breach, but the Government didn’t actually default.
Debt Ceiling Watch (II): October 2
From Alec Phillips/Goldman Sachs today (not online):
…the Treasury bill market is clearly indicating concern about upcoming debt ceiling deadlines …