From Arnold Kling‘s entry yesterday:
Kwak goes on to endorse Chinn’s ideological rant that the Bush tax cuts caused the financial crisis. Yes, I know that Chinn is speaking in the tone of economic analysis rather than a rant, but only a left-wing ideologue would take the thesis seriously. I bet Kwak cannot find a blog post of Chinn’s where he made a policy point against Democrats/liberals or for Republicans/conservatives.
By Richard Posner’s math…On August 25th he wrote, regarding Dr. Romer’s August 6 speech:
Richard Posner has a critique of public intellectuals who work in the public sphere (with special reference to Christina Romer), either in government service, or in journalistic fora. Mark Thoma and Brad Delong have already made clear the (many) points at which Mr. Posner has gone astray. Parenthetically, I’ll add that I wonder about the analytical abilities of anybody who lumps Philip Glass (!) and Elliott Carter together into the highbrow music category (see page 18 in his tome Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (1991)). More substantively, I have a few of additional observations, some of which are amplifications of Brad Delong’s points.
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.
You might find these interesting:
Some quick remarks about the evidence for economic recovery, central bank independence, and Goldman Sachs.
A very neat interactive graphic from the NYT showing changes in same-store sales for different establishments. (Click on the store name at the left, and tip your hat to Economix).
Keith Hennessey, who used to have Larry Summers’ job in the Bush White House, on the challenges facing the White House in framing discussion of the effectiveness of the existing stimulus package. See Obama’s apparent answer here.
And a hilarious story via Calculated Risk on why Wells Fargo is suing itself.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has put together some very useful timelines of the financial crisis, if you want a handy reference for what happened when in both the United States and around the world.
The BEA reported that disposable personal income increased 1.6% between April and May. In the absence of the stimulus cuts to personal taxes and increases in social benefit payments, the number would have been 0.2%. Real personal consumption expenditures were up 0.2% for the month, though that leaves the April-May average 0.1% below the January-March average. Calculated Risk, always your go-to source for these matters, sums it up this way:
Usually PCE and Residential Investment (RI) lead the economy out of recession, and right now both remain weak. As households increase their savings rate to repair their balance sheets, it seems unlikely that PCE will increase significantly any time soon.
And via Craig Newmark, earn $11 a day by working in hell.
The UCSD Economics Department has set up a remembrance page in honor of Clive Granger. Those of you who contributed such moving remarks here at Econbrowser are invited to enter them also on the UCSD remembrance page, as well as to visit the other material collected there.