With the employment situation release, we have a first reading on April conditions.
Consumption per capita Relative to Trend
Are you better of than you expected four years ago? I use trend growth 2016-2019 to figure out what is “expected”.
Guest Contribution: “Elections and Devaluations”
Today, we present a guest post 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. A shorter version appeared at Project Syndicate. He thanks Sohaib Nasim for research assistance.
Are You Better Off than You Were Five Years Ago?
Reader Steven Kopits writes in response to Are you better off than you were four years ago?:
Decomposing Sentiment
Republicans and lean Republican respondents really, really, really don’t like economic conditions right now, switching “bigly” upon Trump’s election, contributing an outsize impact on the overall University of Michigan consumer sentiment index. Democrats and lean Democratic respondents think things are about the same as mid-2016 (under Obama).
Are You Better Off than You Were Four Years Ago?
GDP per capita, consumption per capita, disposable income per capita, unemployment, economic policy uncertainty, VIX, and Misery Index — plus median household income.
Confidence, Sentiment, and News in April: Some Time Series
Sharp reactions to Conference Board consumer confidence index today. Here’s some context for this movement, as well as that in the U.Michigan survey of economic sentiment.
Four Measures of the Output Gap and Measuring Trends
Talking about a rethink of the output gap, and the concept of the trend-cycle decomposition in macro policy tomorrow. Here’s a picture of the output gap from CBO, from two statistical filters (Hodrick-Prescott and Fleischman-Roberts/Fed Board), and the Delong and Summers (BPEA 1988) model.
California in Recession (?)
That’s the almost gleeful conclusion in an article in the Washington Examiner last December. Now, it’s true they based that conclusion on a Legislative Analyst’s Office report. However, that conclusion was based on the (inappropriate) use of the (national level) Sahm rule to state level unemployment rates. And as Dr. Sahm has remarked, this is not the right way to go — rather one needs to examine the appropriate threshold for a given state before using it to infer a recession.
Wouldn’t It Be Nice…
That’s the song I was thinking about when I saw the headline in the WSJ, Trump Allies Draw Up Plans to Blunt Fed Independence: