Back in November 2009, Casey Mulligan asked this question, and observed:
Both of these [disposable income and consumption] are HIGHER in September 2009 than they were a year earlier.
I observed that it made sense to look at per capita values; and that changed the conclusions substantially.
Join a distinguished panel of speakers, including Jeffry Frieden, Stanfield Professor of International Peace, Department of Government, Harvard University, Menzie Chinn, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, and Michael Knetter, Albert O. Nicholas Dean, Wisconsin School of Business, for a discussion of pressing questions facing the global and U.S. economies in the aftermath of the crisis. Moderated by Mark Copelovitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs.
From Reuters:
China’s $7.24 billion deficit in March, the first time the trade balance has been in the red since April 2004, mainly reflected strong imports of oil, raw materials and cars, the General Administration of Customs said on Saturday.
Ten of the 11 recessions in the United States since World War II have been preceded by a sharp increase in the price of crude petroleum. Oil had been holding around $80/barrel over the last month, but traded as high as $87 last week, leading the Financial Times to ask whether oil could give the “kiss of death to recovery.” Here is how I would answer that question.
Yanping Chong, Oscar Jorda and Alan M. Taylor have tackled the perennial challenge of measuring the long run relationship between the real exchange rate and per capita income levels. From the abstract to The Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis: Real Exchange Rates and their Long-Run Equilibrium:
Frictionless, perfectly competitive traded-goods markets justify thinking of purchasing power parity (PPP) as the main driver of exchange rates in the long-run. But differences in the traded/non-traded sectors of economies tend to be persistent and affect movements in local price levels in ways that upset
the PPP balance (the underpinning of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, HBS). This paper uses panel-data techniques on a broad collection of countries to investigate the long-run properties of the PPP/HBS equilibrium using novel local projection methods for cointegrated systems. …
A few items from the ‘sphere that you might find interesting.
Econbrowser readers will know that I’ve long been interested in how derivatives like futures predict commodity prices. An early paper on energy futures, coauthored with my former CEA colleagues Michael LeBlanc and Oli Coibion, was summarized in this 2006 post (paper here). Recently, Oli Cobion and I have updated and expanded our examination, to incorporate for the most recent data, account for GARCH effects, alloow for time variation, and to try to explain why there has been time variation in the deviations in the unbiasedness proposition.
From the abstract to our paper:
It was an exciting basketball tournament, right down to the final game.
Finally we’re starting to see some convincing indications of economic recovery.
From today’s Economist, Greg Ip writes:
America’s economic transformation will require businesses to rely less on selling to Americans and more on selling abroad…. The emphasis will be on high-value products and services rather than on labour-intensive items such as furniture and clothing.