Commenting on what has been termed “Francogeddon” and a “tsunami” as well as consequent mayhem, Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg/Business Week writes:
“Today the Swiss National Bank shocked the world when it announced it would remove the cap it had in place to prevent the Swiss franc from rising too high against the euro.”
If you dynamic score, dynamically score both expenditure and revenue measures.
Update: The World Bank’s forecasts are also now out, summarized here. Russia is forecasted to hurtle into a deep recession.
Two chapters from the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects are out.
The JEC Chair Brady (R) writes: “While the unemployment rate has fallen it doesn’t tell the true story about stagnant paychecks and Americans struggling to find full-time work.” He then calls for passage of Keystone-XL as part of the remedy.
The price of oil passed another milestone last week, falling below $50 a barrel, a level that I had not expected to see again in my lifetime.
In today’s NY Times, Peter Eavis writes about the message in “soaring bond prices”:
…a huge bond market with a strong track record for predicting economic problems is flashing a warning sign right now. … The prices of Treasury bonds are rallying fiercely.
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Joshua Aizenman, Dockson Chair in Economics and International Relations. This post is based on a presentation at the Society for the Study of Emerging Markets Panel session, AEA meetings, Boston, January 3, 2015.
Some people have fixated upon the near doubling of the minimum wage after WW II (one person misidentifies the date as 1948, but it’s actually 1950) as a cause of disemployment in certain groups. This may have happened; however, the increase in the minimum wage from $0.40 to $0.75 was not associated with a decrease in general employment, nor of youth unemployment.
Reader Patrick R. Sullivan keeps on talking about the post-World War II boom, and telling people to watch The Best Years of Our Lives (A fine movie, by the way). I think I know why he thinks times were great for all, if your history comes from Hollywood. Rick Stryker chimes in with the statement: “If you talk to people who were around right after WWII, as I have, you’ll find that they agree with Patrick R. Sullivan that the latter part of the 1940s was a boom.”