From CBS News, an excerpt of a Palin twitter message:
“Extreme Greenies:see now why we push’drill,baby,drill’of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?”
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
Global Imbalances and the Crisis
In today’s VoxEU, Kati Suominen asks “Did global imbalances cause the crisis?, and surveys the arguments. I recently wrote a survey on the same topic for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization. Here’s my take:
Exchange Rate Angst and Rebalancing
As the euro has plummeted against the USD, there’s been concern that efforts to rebalance the global economy will face increasing headwinds. [Bergsten] [Duy]. This worry is only added to by the already widening US trade deficit [1]. In this post, I don’t want to dispute the difficulty of effecting global rebalancing. It was already a difficult task, even before the euro area’s recent debt-related travails. What I do want to do is to put the recent exchange rate movements in perspective. My three observations are as follows:
The Job Shortfall: Then and Now
In an interesting post a couple weeks ago, Keith Hennessey critiques the President’s recent speech about employment growth, and presents the following graph, to highlight the gap between where employment is and where it “should” be.
Macroeconometrics in the Mountains
I’m just back from a two day conference at the Norges Bank‘s conference center in the mountains north of Oslo (organized by Karsten Gerdrup, Christian Kascha, Francesco Ravazzolo and Dagfinn Rime). For me as an end-user of econometric methods, this was a great experience. I got to see some recent developments in applying time series methods to problems in macro and finance (and to see Norway for the first time). Here were some of the papers presented and discussed (I’ve omitted the papers that are not posted online).
Mind the Gap
Even as inflation continues to fall [0], there are calls to raise interest rates soon in order to quell inflationary pressures. I remember reading similar calls for monetary restraint in Japan in 2000-01, when that country was struggling to escape deflation (I sure had a hard time explaining the fears to my boss, and indeed never came up with a good answer). But rather than dismiss these calls, I think it useful to revisit the different measures of the output gap, to see whether those fears of rampant inflation due to disappearing slack make sense. Fortuitously, Michael Kiley has just circulated a new paper reviewing the various concepts of the output gap (see also these previous posts: [1] [2] [3]).
Cyclically Adjusted Budget Balance, Updated
The CBO has just released new estimates of the cyclically adjusted, or structural, budget balance (link here). They’ve also given the series a new name, and some new tweaks. First, observation — the cyclically adjusted deficit is substantially smaller than the actual in 09Q4.
The FRTG Estimate Clarified
The TFRG range of oil spill flow reported yesterday was the lower bound. From PBS Newshour, regarding the 12,000-19,000 barrel per day estimate:
…at least two experts on the panel say that those numbers actually represent what they consider the lower boundary range of the possible amount of oil.
WWRPA at the Hearings of SUAC?
Or, “What would Rand Paul Ask at the Hearings of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee?”. From AP:
“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'” Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”
The (Macro) World at Your Fingertips
Or, at least the G-20 at your fingertips.
Eswar Prasad (Cornell and Brookings) and Karim Foda have put together a new website, “TIGER: Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery”.
In collaboration with the Financial Times (FT), Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda of Brookings have developed a set of composite indexes which track the global economic recovery. The Financial Times has produced the Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER) interactive map, which appears on the FT Web site.