Horizontal fracturing of tight hydrocarbon-bearing formations was responsible for a phenomenal resurgence in U.S. oil production, which rose more than 4 million barrels per day from 2010 levels before peaking in April of last year.
Continue reading
What Is “Solid Economic Reasoning”?
Writing in The Nation, Robert Pollin asserts:
All of [Bernie Sanders’s] major proposals are grounded in solid economic reasoning and evidence.
US-China Trade Policies: the Nuclear — and Near-nuclear — Options
Substantial attention has been devoted to the disasterous effects of implementing a Donald Trump agenda of imposing 45% tariffs on imports of goods from China. To gain some perspective, consider the implications for prices of goods imported from China if such a tariff were imposed (and a large country assumption used, so that only half of the tariff increase manifested in increased prices).
Figure 1: Price of Chinese commodity imports, 2003M12=100, with 2016M03 values at 2016M02 values (bold blue), and a 22.5% higher price level as of 2017M02 assuming the half of incidence falls on the US (red). Light green shaded area denotes projection period. Vertical axis is logarithmic. Source: BLS, and author’s calculations.
Obviously, drop the large country assumption, and the resulting price increase can be up to 45%.
Uber efficiency
Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are using a vastly more efficient technology for matching people who want a ride with people who want to drive them than was available when the taxi radio dispatch systems were set up in the 1940s.
Continue reading
Wisconsin Employment Still Lags (Quelle Surprise!)
BLS just released state level data. Wisconsin employment nonfarm payroll employment is up, but remains below what is expected given the historical relationship between US and Wisconsin employment — by 63.2 thousand…
Guest Contribution: “Inequality: Diagnoses and Prescriptions”
Today we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and former Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1997-99. This is an extended version of one published in Project Syndicate.
Text of Executive Order 9066
From The Hill:
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump echoed rival Ted Cruz on Tuesday in calling for patrols of Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S., and said the country must begin torturing terror suspects to get information out of them.
“The End of Research in Wisconsin”
That’s the title of a Slate article documenting the implications of recent policy actions implemented in the state of Wisconsin.
Recent moves in oil prices
Today I discuss the factors that brought oil prices so far down and more recently back up.
Continue reading
Guest Contribution: “Did the Markets Overlook Fed Bullishness in the March 16 FOMC Statement? “
Today we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and former Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1997-99.