The paperback edition of Lost Decades is officially released as of today.
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
Benchmark Revisions and Nonfarm Payroll Employment since January 2009
The BLS released preliminary annual benchmark revisions for March 2012. Nonfarm payroll series and private nonfarm payroll series, in logs, normalized to 2009M01, are shown below; adding on the revised levels for March 2012 yields the series shown in red.
The Employment Situation in Governor Walker’s Wisconsin in 2012: “Grim”
From IHS-Global Insight, “U.S. Regional – Perspective Article: Swing States: Wisconsin,” 9/24/2012:
Lost Decades: Two Years Later
The paperback edition of Lost Decades (W.W. Norton) is to be officially released October 1st. This seems as appropriate a juncture as any to assess the predictions Jeffry Frieden and I wrote almost two years ago.
Global Imbalances
Some observations on the difficult tasks of identifying and explaining such imbalances
Imperfect Information, Biased Reasoning, and the Energy Efficiency Gap
In a new working paper, David Austin argues that for a variety of reasons, private agents do not optimize with respect to energy efficiency measures. From Addressing Market Barriers to Energy Efficiency in Buildings:
China’s Trade Surplus
The August numbers are in. From MarketWatch:
China posted a wider-than-expected trade surplus in August as imports unexpectedly contracted from the year-ago period, suggesting anemic domestic demand, according to data released Monday.
The August Employment Report
Policy action is needed, with all deliberate speed.
Representative Ryan on Conditional Macroeconomic Prediction
Are You Better Off Than You Were at the End of the Bush Administration? A Data-Based Assessment
I’ve heard a lot about the “four years ago” comparison. Four years ago, we were on the cusp of Don Luskin’s famous prediction (“… we’re on the brink not of recession, but of accelerating prosperity.”), and Phill Gramm had two months earlier decried the ongoing “mental recession”. [0] It seems to me the more appropriate marker is the last election, in 2008Q4. We can then assess what the data tells us about 2012Q2 vis a vis 2008Q4.