We’re pleased today to feature a guest contribution to Econbrowser from Kash Mansori, senior economist for Jefferson Wells International.
Category Archives: housing
Executive compensation
Is there a problem? And is there a solution? My answers: yes, and yes.
Finding the exit
How you think we might get out of our current economic problems has something to do with how you think we got into them in the first place.
Some encouraging developments
Plenty of gloom out there if you’re hungry for more. But I wanted to pass along a couple of developments this week that give me some hope.
The global recession
IMF research economist
Prakash Loungani reports some statistics on the extent to which housing price declines are being seen worldwide.
Roundtable discussion on the financial crisis
I participated on Friday with several other UCSD faculty members (including Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz) in a discussion about the current economic crisis. If you have RealPlayer, you can view the discussion here, though I recommend fast-forwarding to skip the first 8 introductory minutes to get to the actual discussion. If you just want my slides, I’ve posted them here.
Housing Prices: How Far to Go until Bottom?
I’ll just take the market’s view here; using the futures prices from the CME (via ino.com), prices will fall about another 16% from June (or 17% in log terms):
Brad DeLong on Bernanke and Paulson
Brad DeLong had some insightful and amusing observations on the priorities of Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I can’t resist reproducing Brad’s comments with some annotations of my own.
Paulson bailout
Let me begin with the point on which I am in complete agreement with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke– it is hard to overstate just how scary this week’s developments in financial markets could be.
Synergies of the unpleasant kind: recessions, credit crunches and housing busts
From the abstract of a new paper by Stijn Claessens, M. Ayhan Kose and Marco E. Terrones, entitled “What Happens During Recessions, Crunches and Busts?” (paper now online here):
We provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles for 21 OECD countries over the 1960-2007 period. In particular, we analyze the implications of 122 recessions, 112 (28) credit contraction (crunch) episodes, 114 (28) episodes of house price declines (busts), 234 (58) episodes of equity price declines (busts) and their various overlaps in these countries over the sample period. We document a rich set of stylized facts about the behavior of key macroeconomic and financial variables during these various events. Our results indicate that interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables can play major roles in determining the severity and duration of a recession. In particular, we show that recessions associated with credit crunches and house price busts are deeper and last longer than other recessions are. In light of our findings, we examine the implications of recent macroeconomic and financial developments in the United States for the future path of its economy.