The New York Times hosts a discussion of the proposal by World Bank President Robert Zoellick for an international monetary system that uses the price of gold as a reference.
East Asian Exchange Rates and China’s Trade Surplus
By Willem Thorbecke
Today, we’re fortunate to have Willem Thorbecke, Senior Research Fellow at Asian Development Bank Institute, and consulting fellow at Japan’s Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) as a guest contributor. The views expressed represent those of the author himself, and do not necessarily represent those of ADBI, RIETI, or any other institutions the author is affiliated with.
Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and Oil
Current economic conditions
Things look slightly cheerier than they did a month ago. But that’s not saying much.
The October Employment Situation: Upside Surprise and Shrinking Government
The Employment situation release for October surprised on the upside: the Bloomberg consensus was for 60,000 increase and the actual was 151,000. And yet I receive emails from the JEC-Republican stating:
“The Impact of Health Insurance Reform in Massachusetts”
The use of emergency rooms for routine care fell, as did hospital admissions for treating preventable conditions, and the proportion of uninsured among hospital inpatients (by 36%), while there was no increase in the growth of hospital costs. From the NBER Digest article summarizing NBER working paper 16012 [ungated version] by Jonathan T. Kolstad and Amanda E. Kowalski:
QE2, News, and Differential Impacts in Asset Markets
Typically, economists assume that news, defined as information that induces revisions to expectations of the future value of relevant variables, should affect asset prices simultaneously, and in a consistent manner. That’s why today’s announcement of QE2 has somewhat surprising effects, if one is to believe that QE2 had already been priced in [0].
QE2: Been there, done that
The Federal Open Market Committee announced today that:
the Committee decided today to expand its holdings of securities. The Committee will maintain its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings. In addition, the Committee intends to purchase a further $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month.
Election spin
Arnold Kling notes that exit polls show that 52% of those who voted have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party and 53% have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party. Arnold comes up with this conclusion:
People with an unfavorable view of Democrats went 88-10 for Republicans, but people with an unfavorable view of Republicans only went 76-22 Democrat.
That was the difference in the election. The “unfavorables” on net broke Republican. The way I would spin it is that there is a large block of voters who are negative on both parties, the Republicans captured a larger share of that block, and that block swung the election.
Detachment from Reality and Innumeracy as Impediments to Rational Discourse
Tax cut version