The death of peak oil

“Peak oil is dead,” Rob Wile declared last week. Colin Sullivan says it has “gone the way of the Flat Earth Society”, writing

Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up.

These comments inspired me to revisit some of the predictions made in 2005 that received a lot of attention at the time, and take a look at what’s actually happened since then.

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Teaching Mundell-Fleming, Interest Rate Parity, and the LM Curve

Simon Wren-Lewis’s post has sparked vigorous discussion [1] [2] (and rejoinder) of whether the teaching of Mundell-Fleming, omitting uncovered interest parity, to our undergraduate students is defensible. In addition, he wonders whether it makes sense to use an LM curve, given the absence of a stable money demand curve, and the fact that most advanced country central banks target a policy rate. I think these are good questions for teachers, as well as those who provide advice regarding policy measures.

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Understanding the housing bubble

A key reason that I was insufficiently worried in 2005 about bad mortgage loans being made at the time was that the people who funded the loans– most importantly, the packagers and buyers of private-label mortgage-backed securities– had more motivation and resources to evaluate the risks accurately than I did. That they made an incredibly costly mistake is now indisputable. But the question remains, why?

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Wisconsin Employment: Still Lagging despite Upward Revisions

Earlier this week, the BLS released new estimates of state employment, based upon Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data through September 2012. The figures for Wisconsin have been substantially revised upward. As indicated in previous posts [1] [2] , census data had indicated substantially higher nonfarm payroll employment than that derived from surveys.

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