Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers..
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Trumpian Immigration Policy
Once again I’m going to save Donald Trump some time in writing up the legislation. Here is some handy-dandy text borrowed from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Government Shutdown Expectations
Now at 29%, according to PredictIt, for 1/22 (CR ends midnight this Friday).
Source: PredictIt.
More Faith Based Budgeting from Mnuchin
From Reuters:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday he believed the Republican tax cuts will ultimately become revenue neutral over 10 years due to higher growth, but the Treasury will likely ask Congress for more money to implement the plan.
Negative interest rates
A few years ago, most economic models presumed that interest rates were subject to a lower bound of zero. Why lend a dollar to someone who only promises to pay you back 99 cents, when you could just hold on to the dollar yourself? But we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. We have enough data now to take a look at how much that seems to have accomplished, and update my earlier discussion of this topic.
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The Year in Review, 2017: Fighting against Normalization of Lying
Last year’s recap was subtitled “Triumph of the Blowhards”. So far, my plea for the return of rational policy analysis (let alone facts) has failed to occur. But the struggle for sanity must continue.
Pr(Mueller Replaced by 6/30) from Prediction Markets
Source: PredictIt accessed 12/21.
Closing price 34 cents. I assume this means that there is 1/3 chance that President Trump will fire Mueller within the next 6 months. Not surprising given the President’s rabid attacks on the FBI.
Kansas and Missouri GDP Trends since Brownback
Figure 1: Kansas real GDP in mn.Ch.2009$ SAAR (black) and log linear deterministic trend based on 2005-2010 (red), a log difference stationary fit* (green) all on log scale. Source: BEA and author’s calculations.
“Financial Spillovers and Macroprudential Policies”
That’s the title of a new paper by Joshua Aizenman, Hiro Ito and me.
Ethnic Diversity Measured
In trying to explain why Canada has lower gun death rates than the US, Bruce Hall boldly asserts that Canada is more ethnically homogenous than the US. I wonder in this data-rich era why people make bold assertions like this.