Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

Financing U.S. Debt

Is There Enough Money in the World — and At What Cost?

From the abstract of a paper coauthored with John Kitchen:

This paper examines the potential role for foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and the associated implications for Treasury security interest rates, international portfolio allocations, net international income flows, and the U.S. net international debt position, using a baseline outlook of current and projected U.S. budget deficits and growing debt. …

Continue reading

“Future Recession Risks”

That’s the title of a new FRBSF Economic Letter. From Future Recession Risks, by Travis Berge and Oscar Jorda:

An unstable economic environment has rekindled talk of a double-dip recession. The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index provides data for predicting the probability of a recession but is limited by the weight assigned to its indicators and the varying efficacy of those indicators over different time horizons. Statistical experiments with LEI data can mitigate these limitations and suggest that a recessionary relapse is a significant possibility sometime in the next two years.

Continue reading

Vast Ice ‘Island’ Breaks Free of Greenland Glacier

From NYT, a quote of researcher Jason Box:

Petermann [glacier] is a sleeping giant that is slowly awakening. Removing flow resistance leads to flow acceleration… The coincidence of this area loss and a 30 square kilometer loss in 2008 with abnormal warmth this year, the setting of increasing sea surface temperatures and sea ice decline are all part of a climate warming pattern.

Continue reading