Just a quick observation today, elicited by a question: what has been a consistent source of growth since the recovery began?
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
“An Examination of U.S. Dollar Declines”
That’s the title of a blogpost by Roosevelt Bowman and Jan J.J. Groen at the New York Fed. The write:
…we examine the role of market uncertainty and currency risk premia in the pace and size of episodes of dollar weakness since 1991. We find that the most recent bout of U.S. dollar declines largely can be attributed to the recovery in global economic activity from the most recent recession.
CBO on Income Inequality, and Interpreting OWS
Tabulating Inequality Trends
The CBO released a report on income inequality earlier this week. This means that the “inequality deniers” are having a more difficult time arguing that widening spreads an wages, compensation, or overall income are merely statistical artifacts dreamt up by liberals (see e.g. here). What is of most interest is (i) real after-tax income of the top 1 percentile has risen about 275%, and (ii) the pre-transfers/pre-tax income share of the top 1% has increased most profoundly.
IMF Book Forum: “Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery”
The transcript and video for the IMF Book Forum (October 14th) is now online here. Nobel Laureate George Akerlof (UC Berkeley) moderated, Diane Lim Rogers (EconomistMom, Concord Coalition) and Gail Cohen (Joint Economic Committee) were discussants, and Simon Johnson (Baseline Scenario, MIT) provided concluding comments.
The Dollar and the Renminbi as International Currencies
There’s been a lot of discussion of the potential rise of the Renminbi as an international currency. In particular, Jeffrey Frankel has recently written a paper on the subject (blogpost), backed in part on research we did in our papers [1] [2] on the dollar. Now, the New York Fed’s Linda Goldberg, Mark Choi and Hunter Clark have re-examined some of benefits of being an international currency in a post entitled What If the U.S. Dollar’s Global Role Changed?.
“Financial Stability in Emerging Markets: Dealing with Global Liquidity”
That was the title of a conference in Beijing (October 21st), organized by the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) . I had the privileged of delivering a keynote speech. The conference agenda is here, and encompassed three sessions: Global Liquidity — Consequences and Policy Options; Dealing with International Capital Flows; and a panel forum on International Capital Flows and the International Monetary System.
Guest Contribution: The Great Slump is Not Yet Half Over
By David Papell and Ruxandra Prodan
Today, we’re fortunate to have David Papell and Ruxandra Prodan, Professor and Clinical Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, as Guest Contributors.
The Real American Jobs Act: Dealing with the Threat from Farm Dust Regulation (Really!)
When I click on the link on the website for The Real American Jobs Act (officially, “Jobs Through Growth Act”), this is what I get:
Wealth Inequality: A Time Series Plot
Dismissing the plots of income inequality in previous posts [0] (related posts [1] [2]), an Econbrowser reader asks:
“Do you concur that measures of the wealth distribution have been mostly quiescent since the 1970s and that the distribution of wealth is more even today than it was in the 1940s (the peak for the US modern era)?”
Well, I think that this is an interesting question, and so I went a-searching for data. This is what I found, which led to my answer of “no”.
Crowding Out Watch, Again
I thought my March post on crowding out would be my last for a while, but the latest data are startling enough so that I wanted to post this graph of ten year real interest rates. Just for all those people who were worrying about big jumps in rates with government borrowing.