The La Follette School will host its third La Follette Forum, funded by the Kohl Initiative and the Center for European Studies, on Wednesday, May 4, 2022. With guest speakers Adam Posen (Peterson IIE), Catherine Rampell (WaPo), Paul Blustein (formerly WSJ, WaPo), Oriana Skylar Mastro (Stanford), Jamelle Bouie (NYT), Daniel Ziblatt (Harvard), and discussion by UW faculty.
Climate Change and Mitigation Policies
Teaching Public Affairs 200 “Contemporary public policy issues” this semester, we had the good fortune to have a guest lecture by Greg Nemet (my colleague at La Follette, and a lead author on IWG3 Report of the IPCC Assessment Round 6) on Wednesday. He covered an enormous amount of material in one short lecture, here:
How Much Faster Has American Inflation Been Compared to Euro Area Inflation?
Since the pandemic struck, 0.4 percentage points (headline), 0.7 percentage points (core) [with additional results/graphs, 4/24]
IMF World Economic Outlook Forecasts
The entire IMF April WEO is out, with analytical chapters on private debt/global recovery, greener labor markets, and global trade and value chains. The forecasts are revised downward, at global and at national levels, for certain countries:
Fantasies of the Past
From people who extrapolate from personal observations, while dismissing statistics; to wit:
The chip shortage is ending. My Whirlpool contact told me they are now back to full production and going downstream to a HVAC company I am related to, all chip shortages ended in late summer.
Auto will be over by Halloween. Production of new cars will surge into 2021. Creating deflationary pressures. People like Condon don’t anticipate, they create intellectual fantasies.
That was a comment by Gregory Bott in September 2021.
So read this latest comment (from today) regarding the oil price increase/Russian invasion impact on economic prospects with that prognostication in mind:
I see little actual disruption. My guess by May, this will be reversed. Much like the coming upward revisions to gdp/payrolls in 2020-21. Be careful with struggling government data.
Gregory Bott may turn out to be right in the end. But I’m not betting on it (and I just really don’t know how people can be confident about things when the situation is so fluid).
Business Cycle Indicators as of Mid-April
Key indicators noted by NBER BCDC, including Friday release of industrial production for March – continuing upward progress.
China Q1 GDP, Illustrated
NBS released GDP numbers for Q1 yesterday, surprising on the upside (1.3% q/q vs. 0.6% Bloomberg consensus, not annualized; 4.8% y/y vs. 4.4%).
How Much Were GDP Forecasts Revised Down by Russia’s Invasion?
The Russian invasion probably explains the bulk of the downward revisions in the WSJ’s consensus.
Global Climate Change: Some Links
The challenges of global climate change are with us, even if Russia’s aggression in central Europe is threatening to send the world economy into recession, and populations into starvation.
Corporate Profits, pre-tax, w/o IVA and CCAdj
10 seconds on FRED allows one to see a time series. 20 seconds in a stats package (or even Excel) allows one to see ahead of time if one is going to write something stupid.