Required Reading on the History of (Macro)economic Thought

Why was the financial crisis of 2008 so surprising to so many macroeconomists (but from my experience, a little less so for international finance economists familiar with financial crises in emerging markets…)? From the conclusion to George Akerlof’s “What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years” in the latest JEP.

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Business Cycle Indicators, End-2019

Here are some key indicators tracked by NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee:

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2019M01=0.  Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (12/30 release), and author’s calculations.

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Is California in Recession? (Part XVIII)

November employment figures are out. Time to re-evaluate this assessment from two years ago in Political Calculations that California was in recession.

Going by these [household survey based labor market] measures, it would appear that recession has arrived in California, which is partially borne out by state level GDP data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. [text as accessed on 12/27/2017]

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