Was this the new (reverse) “Plaza Accord”? From Bloomberg:
Author Archives: Menzie Chinn
Revisions: The Global Outlook in the WEO
The IMF released the World Economic Outlook‘s forecasts yesterday. There’s been plenty of coverage, so I won’t recap the main points, but rather focus in on some interesting aspects:
- The rapidity of the downshifting of estimates since January.
- Commodity price prospects and the LDCs.
Distressing Table of the Day
Here’s the basis for the $945 billion estimate of losses to the financial sector. From the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report:
Downshifting and Reversion in Forecasts: Global Version
The decoupling thesis seems to be ever more out of fashion. From the FT today:
Nonfarm Payroll Employment: The Movie
By Menzie Chinn
As informative as the nonfarm payroll employment numbers were, of even more interest to me are the revisions. Figure 1 depicts payroll employment estimates from the January (blue), February (red) and March (green) releases.
IMF World Economic Outlook Analytic Chapters Released
Several chapters of the IMF’s semi-annual research document are now available online, in advance of the IMF-Bank meetings.
The Yuan on the Move: An Update
And a bit on the IMF’s revised forecast for the US.
From Reuters, “U.S.’s Paulson praises China on currency progress”:
Maybe not so nonsensical after all
How far will house prices fall? Implications from the latest WSJ survey.
“Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World”
From Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World, March 25.
Satellite imagery from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals that a 13,680 square kilometer (5,282 square mile) ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica.
Recoupling, Monetary Policy Divergence, and the Dollar
At the risk of losing my audience by skipping over the the record housing price decline, and an outsized drop in the consumer confidence index, I’m going to focus on what seems like old news (but is being reflected in current news on the dollar), namely the OECD reduction in growth forecasts for the G-7 economies. The euro area economy is slated to do better than the US economy in 2008H1, but that’s not saying much.