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.
Do rising oil prices threaten the economic recovery?
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.
Measuring the Long Run Real Exchange Rate – Income Relationship
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. …
Links for 2010-04-07
A few items from the ‘sphere that you might find interesting.
The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures: Latest Estimates
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:
NCAA tournament winner
It was an exciting basketball tournament, right down to the final game.
Looks good to me
Finally we’re starting to see some convincing indications of economic recovery.
“Export or Die”
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.
PPACA and “What If?” Scenarios
Or, if we have Excel, why can’t journalists and bloggers add and subtract, and do sensitivity analysis?
From Dobridge, Hooper, Slok, “Overview of the 2010 Health Reform Bill,” Deutsche Bank Global Economic Perspectives March 31, 2010. [not online]
Congress seeks more information on health care charges
AT&T announced last week that it would charge $1 billion against its earnings as a result of the recently passed health care bill. Other companies also announcing charges include Caterpillar ($100 M), John Deere ($150 M), and
MMM ($85-90 M). Analyst David Zion of Credit Suisse estimated that S&P 500 companies will rack up a combined $4.5 B charge.