Since Mr. Mulvaney has been criticizing the numbers produced by the BLS [1], and scoring by CBO [2], I thought it of interest to see Mr. Mulvaney’s record on predictions. To make things easy on Mr. Mulvaney, I thought it would be more fair to evaluate his “nowcasting” abilities.
TrumpCare Evaluated
“I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
— Donald J. Trump, September 27, 2016
2017 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge
March Madness returns! All are invited to sign up for the world famous tenth annual Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge, in which you can demonstrate your inability to predict the outcome of the U.S. college men’s basketball tournament. If you want to participate, go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven’t used that site before, and fill in your bracket before Thursday at noon!
I see that a number of the more serious Econbrowsers have already joined the group before I even got this announcement up, including last year’s winner Jackiegee. So watch out, these guys are good at correctly anticipating!
How Financially Open Is the World?
Hiro Ito, who updates our de jure financial openness index (sometimes known as the Chinn-Ito index), has recently calculated GDP-weighted averages of the indices for country categories. The stylized facts regarding the evolution of openness changes, particularly with regard to emerging market economies.
Noted Forecaster Sean Spicer on CBO Projections
From The Hill:
If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday.
Wisconsin Benchmarked Employment through January: Flat since April
Today, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development released establishment data benchmarked to data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages through September of 2016. Briefly, Wisconsin employment continues to lag the Nation, and its neighbor Minnesota.
National Security and Trade Deficits
National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro writes in the WSJ:
The national-security argument that trade deficits matter begins with this accounting identity: Any deficit in the current account caused by imbalanced trade must be offset by a surplus in the capital account, meaning foreign investment in the U.S.
“GOP Economist Concerned Data Quality May Be Hurt Under Trump”
That’s the title of an article in Bloomberg yesterday.
“I remain concerned, particularly in an environment where you’re talking about cutting the budget, that a victim in that exercise could be the production of good data,” Glenn Hubbard, who served as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003, said Monday in Washington.
Kansas Employment Decline Continues
I know this is exactly the same title as this December post, but it still applies. The comparison to its neighbor Missouri throws in sharp relief the enormity of the Kansas catastrophe.
Econbrowser Preservation of Government Records: Environmental Edition
As the Administration contemplates deep cuts to scientific data acquisition, and deleting or restricting public access data sets, I thought it useful to post the global temperature anomaly data, accessible as of today, before it disappears.