Category Archives: Uncategorized

Manufacturing and the Dollar’s Value

New industrial output numbers, including for manufacturing, confirm a slowdown in at least part of the tradables sector.

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Figure 1: Real value of the US dollar against broad basket (black, left scale), manufacturing production (red, right scale), manufacturing employment (blue, right scale), all in logs, 2013M01=0. Source: Federal Reserve Board, BLS, and author’s calculations.

Both production and employment now on a slight downturn, despite recent dollar depreciation. The dollar is 14% higher in log terms relative to mid-2014.

Kansas in (Technical) Recession

The BEA released quarterly state GDP figures today. As of 2015Q4, Kansas has just experienced two consecutive negative GDP growth, a distinction shared with only three other states — Alaska, Oklahoma and Wyoming (North Dakota experienced three quarters of negative growth, but experienced positive growth in Q4). Over the past five quarters, Kansas has experienced four quarters of negative GDP growth.

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Guest Contribution: “Where is global economic growth heading?”

Today, we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Laurent Ferrara (Banque de France, Head of the International Macro Division) and Clément Marsilli (Banque de France, Economist in the International Macro Division). The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Banque de France.

The latest update of the IMF WEO report has been released on April 12, 2016, and can be downloaded from the IMF web site (for a summary see also this Econbrowser post here). The salient fact of this report is that global GDP growth in 2016 has been revised downwards by -0.2pp years, from 3.4%, as assessed in the WEO update of January 2016, to 3.2%. Those revisions are quite homogeneous across countries (-0.2pp for both advanced and emerging/developing countries), although some commodity-exporters countries are more impacted.

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