On a recent visit to UCSD, NYU Professor and Nobel Laureate Rob Engle called my attention to the NYU Stern Volatility Laboratory, a great resource that anyone can use to get some very interesting real-time analysis. Here I’d like to describe some of the features available for assessing the systemic risk posed by financial institutions.
Are We on the Brink of High Inflation?
U.S. Postal Service pension funding
The challenge of meeting pension payments is starting to put a huge burden on the San Diego and California budgets, leading many of us to regret that more voices weren’t raised in objection at the time these commitments were quietly made years ago. For that reason, discussion this week of pensions for U.S. postal workers got my attention.
F for Fail
The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republican analysis of the impact of monetary policy on gasoline prices
I’ve been grading papers for the past half week, so when this popped into my mailbox yesterday morning, I was in a “grading” mood. And when I finished reading it, I determined I would give it an F. From “The Price of Oil and the Value of the Dollar: Declining Value of the U.S. Dollar Adds to the Price of Oil and Gasoline,” Republican Staff Commentary (May 16, 2011):
Shale gas environmental concerns
Technological breakthroughs in methods for drilling for natural gas have opened up the possibility of vast new supplies. However, environmental concerns may turn out to be significant.
What Would Really Bring about a Dollar Dive?
One of the things about reading the op-eds and various articles in the blogosphere is the tendency to hype the possibility of the collapse in this, or the collapse in that. The most recent “bubble” in this type of writing involved hyper-inflation, commodities (silver, anyone?) and the dollar. Now I read things like QEIII would bring about a collapse in the dollar [1] (as if anybody really thought QEIII was politically likely, even if it were advisable on economic grounds); or easy monetary policy would be the culprit. Here’s a choice quote from Jim Rogers:
Oil prices and trading mechanics
A report from Reuters (hat tip: Felix Salmon) attributes the wild commodity price moves last week to algorithmic stop-loss trading.
China’s Currency and Trade Balance: Two Pictures
The US-China Strategic and Economic Dialog is underway. [0] The topics span many issues. One of the perennials is the yuan’s real value and the Chinese trade balance. Here are two figures.
Learning about Long Term Unemployment (II)
Politics and Policy
Last Monday, I discussed some of the findings from the conference on causes and consequences of, and policy responses to, long term unemployment, which brought to UW Madison Prakash Loungani, an Advisor in IMF’s Research Department, Kenneth Scheve, Professor of Political Science at Yale, Phillip Swagel, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and a former Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Economic Policy, Rob Valletta, Research Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Kenneth Troske, Professor of Economics from the University of Kentucky. In today’s post, I will discuss the presentations and papers by Ken Scheve and Phillip Swagel and Ken Troske.
Lower oil prices
Like a roller coaster ride, 2011 saw oil prices climb gradually, only to fall dramatically this last week. Here I offer my thoughts on some of the key contributing factors.