Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made two specific proposals purportedly aimed at safeguarding the Homeland. Presumably, these will be incorporated into the Republican party platform. How would those proposals be implemented and how much would implementation cost?
Guest Contribution: “Fiscal Education for the G-7”
Today, we are pleased to present a guest column 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. This is an extended version of a column appearing at Project Syndicate.
Kansas and Her Neighbors: Economic Activity
I don’t know if it counts as a “disaster”, but Kansas continues to lag its neighbors in economic activity, and to under-perform what is to be expected from historical correlations.
Dueling nowcasts
The second quarter of 2016 is now more than half over, but we won’t receive the first reading on 2016:Q2 GDP from the BEA until the end of July. A forecast of something that is happening right now is sometimes described as a “nowcast”. The Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta are providing a valuable service by publishing continuously updated nowcasts of GDP. But what should we do if they’re giving us rather different numbers?
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Kansas: Zero 12 Month Employment Growth
Or, “ouch!”
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Wisconsin Employment: Falling Further Behind
Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development released employment figures today. Nonfarm payroll employment down 12,000, private NFP down 11,000, month-on-month.
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More on Uncertainty in Open Economy Macro
In my last post, I noted a conference on uncertainty in macroeconomics. Here are two papers of particular interest to me.
“The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks on the Global Economy”
That’s the title of the conference being held today and tomorrow at University College London, and cosponsored by School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, the Banque de France, University of Leicester, the Money, Macro and Finance group, and the Centre for Macroeconomics.
“Spillovers of Conventional and Unconventional Monetary Policy”
That was a title of a conference last summer held by the Swiss National Bank, and noted in this post. Mark A. Wynne and Julieta Yung discuss the conference proceedings.
Expectations of inflation
The FOMC and professional forecasters expect the Fed eventually to achieve its 2% inflation target. The market seems more skeptical.
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