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.
Category Archives: recession
The Global Economic Crisis
Here’s the video from a panel convened by the University of Wisconsin’s Center on World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) on November 20, 2008. Presenting were
Alison Alter, Associate Director of WAGE; Mark J. Ready, Professor of Finance, Investment and Banking; Darian M. Ibrahim, J.D., Assistant Professor of Law; Menzie D. Chinn, Professor of Public Affairs and Economics; and Mark S. Copelovitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, and Edward Friedman, Professor of Political Science.
My powerpoint presentation was posted here if one just wants the slides.
Predicting the trough and a jobless recovery
Michael Dueker is a senior portfolio strategist at Russell Investments and formerly was an assistant vice president in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Michael is also a member of the Blue Chip forecasting panel.
In early February 2008, Michael submitted a piece to Econbrowser that correctly predicted the onset of the current recession, using a model-based forecast.
We are pleased that that he is now presenting forecasts from the same Qual VAR model concerning the recession’s trough date and the magnitude of a jobless recovery to follow, subject to the disclaimer that the content is the responsibility of the author and does not represent official positions of Russell Investments
and does not constitute investment advice.
Comparing recessions
Last week was a tough one for the optimists.
Measuring Import Prices: Implications for GDP Growth
A lot of what has happened to GDP growth over the past few quarters has, in a mechanical sense, depended upon developments in the external accounts. In this post, I examine whether mismeasurement of import prices might have induced mismeasurement of economic output. This idea was prompted by hearing a presentation of Nakamura and Steinsson a couple months ago. The abstract to “Lost in Transit: Product Replacement Bias and Pricing to Market”:
The auto downturn is very serious
I was running out of vocabulary last month to describe just how bad October was for the domestic automakers. But whatever you want to say about October, November was significantly worse.
Recession Dating: Some People Are Going to Be Surprised
The typical Econbrowser reader might not be surprised at the NBER decision — but some others will. From a May 2008 WSJ article:
“The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession,” Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear told a meeting of editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.
…
“I would be very surprised if the NBER, looking back at this period, would date this as a recession,” Mr. Lazear said. There are even indications that revised first-quarter estimates would be slightly stronger than 0.6%. “The optimists seem to have been closer to right on that than the pessimists,” he said.
Just to reiterate, that quote is from May 2008.
Podcast on the Federal Reserve
I did a long interview today with Tom Keene of Bloomberg Radio on the current recession and Federal Reserve policy. You can listen to it by clicking here.
It’s official
The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research announced today that the eleventh U.S. postwar recession began in December of 2007.
Synchronized Recession, Synchronized Stimulus?
The OECD has just released its forecasts. This follows the recent updated IMF forecasts. Growth is evaporating the industrial countries. What is to be done?