From Bloomberg today:
…more than 100 congressional Republicans and several Democrats who, after voting against the stimulus bill, wrote Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood seeking money from $1.5 billion the plan set aside for local road, bridge, rail and transit grants. The $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed last year with no Republican votes in the House and three in the Senate.
The Federal Reserve Board announced on Thursday that it is raising the interest rate at which banks borrow from the Fed’s discount window to 0.75%, a 25-basis-point increase, and intends to return discount lending primarily to the traditional overnight loans.
“The rate hike cycle begins,” declared 24/7 Wall St, and
Business Week reported:
Treasuries fell, pushing yields to the highest levels in at least five weeks, amid concern the Federal Reserve’s increase in the discount rate signaled policy makers are moving closer to lifting benchmark borrowing costs.
But I don’t believe that’s what the discount rate hike means at all.
From today’s Macroeconomic Advisers blogpost, by Joel Prakken:
Frequently, partisan commentators — and even some economists — exclaim that the stimulus has failed because the unemployment rate now exceeds the peak shown in projections prepared before ARRA was implemented. This argument, which clearly — and perhaps intentionally — confuses the pre-stimulus baseline with the incremental effects of the stimulus, would be laughable if it was not taken so seriously in some quarters. For the record, last spring, as the financial crisis that engulfed the economy worsened unexpectedly — but before the stimulus could possibly have had any real effect on the economy — the unemployment rate already had moved above the Administration’s (and many others’) last pre-stimulus projection. So, this is simple: the baseline forecasts were optimistic, but unemployment would be even higher now without the benefit of the stimulus package.
On the one year anniversary of the passage of the ARRA, it seems appropriate to recap, not what the academics say, but what the business sector forecasters say about the impact of the stimulus package.
Also included in Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke’s statement to Congress last week were some guidelines for what we might expect Federal Reserve decisions and communications to look like as we make the gradual adjustment to more normal conditions.
The December trade release surprised some observers in terms of the rise in imports. [0] I think there are some other interesting implications. First, the implied downward revision in GDP is minimal. Second, the drop was less pronounced in the ex-oil trade balance. Third, although real trade flows are rising from their troughs, they have not re-attained pre-Lehman levels. Fourth, the US-China goods trade balance continues to improve.
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke last week released a statement of how the Fed intends to manage its bloated balance sheet over the next few years. Here I offer my interpretation of what his plan involves.
Torsten Slok has a whole set of interesting pictures, two of which are particularly relevant in thinking about the US fiscal situation as compared to other advanced countries.
The Heritage Foundation critiques the CEA assessment of the stimulus. In WebMemo #2799, Dr. Campbell writes:
The CEA’s method, in brief, compared a statistical forecast of the economy based on historical patterns (no stimulus) with the actual economic results in 2009. On this basis, it claims that there are 2 million more jobs in the economy than otherwise would have been the case. The CEA then concludes that this difference between this statistical forecast and the actual results were the effect of the stimulus.
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