Following up on my misalignment post from Tuesday, here’s a volume compiled by the GAO when it was the General Accounting Office containing a symposium on exchange rates. The symposium took place in the midst of currency overvaluation: “Floating Exchange Rates in an Interdependent World”. The authors included Richard Cooper, Stanley Black, Rudiger Dornbusch, Jeffrey Frankel, and Jacob Frenkel.
Policy Analysis in DSGEs
A few weeks ago [0], I wished for a comparative survey of the properties of many macro models, along the lines of the Brookings comparison project of the early 1980’s. I got part of my wish (at least in part), in the form of a (very cool!) comparison of key policy agency dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, in Effects of Fiscal Stimulus in Structural Models (h/t Mark Thoma).
Not a textbook rebound
Is this as good as it gets? For the time being at least, it seems to be.
A Misalignment Primer
As the release of the next Treasury Report to Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies looms, it might be useful to recount the various ways in which different observers define currency “misalignment”.
Why reform health care?
Amidst all the preoccupation with the procedural details of how health care legislation is likely to be implemented, I was glad to see Paul Krugman make the case for why reform is needed in the first place.
The Mason-Dixon Line in Health Care Reform: Economists Edition
The WSJ Real Time Economics blog has posted the letters for and against the health care reform bill winding through Congress. The most interesting thing about the lists of signatories is the geographical divide. It was so interesting, I did a fast tabulation (so, don’t quote me on it), and what one finds is that of the list in favor, only 2 of 41 economists are affiliated with institutions in the South (defined using the most restrictive definition in this Wikipedia page — so to be completely accurate, I haven’t used the actual Mason-Dixon line). Of the 131 signatories to the against letter, 40 are affiliated with institutions in the South, i.e., essentially 30% of the total. A list of affiliations is below:
What the heck is a “Punk Staffer”?
And how does a “punk staffer” differ from a non-punk staffer?
CBO Scoring of HR3590 plus Reconciliation Legislation
The CBO and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation have just released its scoring of “budgetary effects of the reconciliation proposal, in combination with the effects of H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as passed by the Senate”. The link to the document is here. The CBO/JCT estimated reduction in the deficit over FY2010-2019 is $119 billion. A comparison of the impact on the budget balance against previous reconciliation measures is presented in Figure 1, below.
Obama after One Year: Crisis, Response, Recovery
A couple days ago, I presented my views on the policy response to the financial crisis and the Great Recession in a UW Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy / UW CIBER / MITA and ICE sponsored event. The power point slides are here (big file, 1.3MB). I took the latitude as the invited speaker to expand the topic from the Obama Administration’s measures to encompass the response to the crisis and recession from both the fiscal and monetary policy authorities.
Bank supervision and the Federal Reserve
In testimony today before Congress, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke outlined his reasons why the Federal Reserve is uniquely suited to be the regulatory supervisor for U.S. banks.