Miscellanea: America’s Lost Decades, Wisconsin’s Lost Year, Hi Frequency Measures, Europe, and Conditional Inflation Targeting

Lost Decades

 

Here’s my 25 minute presentation of Lost Decades at the Rotary Club of Madison, on January 4th (as recorded by Wisconsin Eye) Powerpoint. One point I made was that the global financial crisis and ensuing recession have exacted a tremendous cost on the US economy. In the absence of more aggressive action, another 2.4 trillion Ch.2005$ loss will be incurred through 2013Q4. The blithe indifference with which opponents of extended payroll tax reductions, extended unemployment benefits, food stamp expenditures and infrastructure investment contemplate the damage continues to astound me.

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Links for 2012-01-18

FT Alphaville on crude oil and the eurozone crisis.

“http://oldprof.typepad.com/a_dash_of_insight/2012/01/evaluating-recession-forecasts.html”>Jeff Miller does not buy into recent forecasts of a U.S. recession. On a related note, Bonddad deconstructs the ECRI Weekly Leading Index.

VoxEu notes the systematic international tendency for official deficit figures to understate the magnitude of the change in public debt.

Liberty Street Economics on forecasting with internet search data.

Dispatches XVIII: Wisconsin Employment and Activity Indicators

As Governor Walker begins a tour of the state to tout a new jobs plan [0], it might be useful to review economic conditions in Wisconsin. Briefly put, Wisconsin employment (total, private) continues to decline, and Wisconsin’s coincident indicator continues to diverge from the US indicator (as well as most other of the region’s indicators). Hence, points made in previous posts [1] [2] still seem applicable.

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“Financial Integration and Global Rebalancing”

I organized the International Economics and Finance Society panel on “Financial Integration and Global Rebalancing” at the
Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in Chicago. In the end, the papers fit together much better than I had anticipated; they all dealt with with the factors driving the puzzling pattern of current account balances — and how policy can possibly influence those patterns.

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