Joe Gagnon (formerly associate director of Monetary Affairs, and of International Finance, Divisions at the Fed) of the Peterson Institute for International Affairs has had enough with the policy paralysis . From Stop Sticking Our Heads in the Sand! A Plan for Action on Jobs:
…our leaders have been in denial about the true nature and magnitude of the problem. The ongoing stock market anxiety surely must wake them up.
There has been a lot of growth over the last decade in funds that take long positions in commodity futures contracts in order to offer investors an asset that follows raw commodity prices. I’ve been looking into some of the data that have been used to measure the size of those positions.
There is plenty of commentary on the S&P decision, including S&P’s difficulties with math, but I do find of salience this part of the release:
Professor Scott Sumner says “No more jobs mystery. Period. End of story.”. I’m not so certain.
From the post:
If I hear one more discussion of the mysterious lack of jobs I’ll explode. The new GDP numbers are the final nail in the coffin. For years I’ve been saying there is no jobs mystery. That any deviation from Okun’s Law was minor compared to the scale of the output collapse. With the new RGDP figures we now know I was right, there isn’t and never was any mystery as to why there are so few jobs. RGDP is very low. Period. End of story.
Here are interviews I did earlier this week on the debt deal:
I have been wondering why so many seem to be indifferent to the plight of the unemployed. Sometimes, the attitude is not so much indifference, but rather irritation that the poor are exempted from the burdens of society (see e.g., [0]).
Here is a plot of the unemployment rate and the alternative unemployment rate including marginally attached and part-time workers.
We finally get our debt-ceiling deal, only to watch the S&P500 fall 3.7% from Thursday’s close. What gives?
Or, why it was so important to keep top marginal income tax rates constant for millionaires.
Figure 1 depicts the income shares accruing to the top 0.5 percent and top 0.1 percent of households (including realized capital gains). It is clear that their shares have declined going from 2007 to 2008; for the top 0.1%, their share has declined from 12.3% to 10.4% of total income.
Or things got a lot worse in 2008Q4 than we thought
The 2011Q2 advance release and revised estimates [0] contained many unpleasant surprises (see Jim’s assessment; also [CR1] and [CR2] [John Taylor] [Izzo/WSJ RTE]). The below consensus growth rate, and downward revision in Q1 growth, have been discussed elsewhere. I want to focus on the implications of the revisions to the data going back to 2003 (with particular emphasis on data back to 2007).
The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported today that U.S. real GDP grew at an annual rate of 1.3% during the second quarter of 2011, and revised down its estimate of first-quarter growth to an even more anemic 0.4%. We knew the first half of the year was disappointing, but this is even weaker than most of us were anticipating.