Category Archives: energy

Links for 2010-01-13

Stuart Staniford, who earlier had been persuaded that global oil production might have already peaked, now comments on the potential for increased production from Iraq to push the peak up to a decade down the road.

King Banaian on disturbing developments in Argentina and Venezuela.

Economists comment on the role of the Fed in the housing bubble. Two in particular worth emphasizing:

Marvin Goodfriend: Interest rate policy was appropriately stimulative in the 2002-3 period. But rates should have been raised less mechanically and more aggressively in 2004-5 on grounds of the usual macroeconomic conditions…. A somewhat tighter stance of interest rate policy then could have cut off the last year or so of the house price appreciation and prevented the worst part of the subsequent adjustment.

Mark Gertler: If we could go back in history and make one policy change, I’d go after sub-prime lending. Absent non-prime lending, the likely outcome of the housing correction of 2007 would have been a mild recession like 2000-2001, and not the debacle we experienced.

Links for 2009-12-16

  • NY Fed economist Erkko Etula finds that he can predict oil prices using the volume of broker-dealer financial assets.
  • Washington University Professor James Morley and separately Kansas City Fed economist Todd Clark haven’t given up on the Great Moderation.
  • My colleague Eli Berman discusses his book Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism
  • Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may seek an increase to their $400 billion federal lifeline before the end of the year.
  • Billy Hallowell puts together a blog carnival on Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances.
  • Berkeley Professor Petr HoYava proposes a new theory of gravity.

Links for 2009-08-10

I spent the last week of July as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, home to Macroblog and a number of superb economists. Their Center for Quantitative Economic Research is now going to be reporting my GDP-Based Recession Indicator Index, as you’ll see from following the link.

Jeff Miller has been looking carefully into the BLS birth-death adjustments (
[1],
[2],
[3]).

And I was interested in this story from the Wall Street Journal:

Houston-based Apache Corp. [APA] has agreed to provide natural gas for export to Asia through a proposed project in Canada, the latest sign that huge gas discoveries in North America are reshaping global energy markets. Kitimat LNG Inc., the Canadian company planning to build the liquefied-natural-gas export terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia, will announce Monday that Apache has become the second major North American gas producer to sign on to the project. Last month, another Houston-based gas producer, EOG Resources Inc., signed a similar deal….

“We’re confident that there’s going to be plenty of gas available for export for a long time,” said Greg Weeres, vice president of Pacific Northern Gas Ltd., which is planning to build a pipeline to supply gas to the Kitimat facility.