The Heritage Foundation’s blog criticizes my recent post thusly:
[Chinn] ignores the fact that Heritage Foundation economists, like most academic macroeconomists, have put away the old Keynesian model in favor of modern alternatives.
I thought it useful to see some of this advanced analysis in action at Heritage. From Heritage Foundation’s Ron Utt — admittedly a long time ago (2008!):
Today, we are fortunate to have a guest contribution from Gaston Gelos, Advisor in the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development, and Yulia Ustyugova, Economist in the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department.
A key player in the financial crisis was insurance giant AIG, which sold a huge volume of credit default swaps supposedly protecting buyers of mortgage-backed securities from losses due to default. But AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to honor these guarantees when things went bad, and much of AIG’s liabilities ended up being picked up by the Fed and the Treasury. On Tuesday the U.S. Treasury announced that it had sold the last of the common shares in AIG that it had acquired as compensation for its emergency assistance to AIG and reported that the Treasury and the Fed had together earned a profit of $22.7 billion as a result of their assistance to AIG. I was curious to take a look at how this story ended up having a happy ending.
Nearly a year ago, Jeffry Frieden and I called for Conditional Inflation Targeting. Today, policy seems to have turned toward that direction. From today’s statement from the FOMC:
One of the puzzles of the post-crisis period is why investment has been so slow. Some would want to resort to stories of uncertainty. Is there something to this idea? Figure 1 depicts the gross investment to net capital stock.
Here’s one of the wilder suggestions floating around for what the President could do if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling.
Lessons from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)
Or, cognitive dissonance in the conservative world
A lot of attention has been given to the optimistic assessments of future U.S. and Iraqi oil production in the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2012. However, perhaps even more dramatic is the report’s prediction of a significant long-term decline in petroleum consumption from the OECD countries. For example, the report predicts about a 1 mb/d drop in U.S. oil consumption by 2020 and a 5 mb/d drop by 2035 relative to current levels. I was curious to examine some of the fundamentals behind petroleum consumption to assess the plausibility of the IEA projections.
The latter is stabilizing at extremely low levels.
Revisions to some of the key indicators bring us back to the same old story– the U.S. economy continues to grow, but at a slower rate than any of us would like.