Today, we’re fortunate to have Mark Copelovitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, as a Guest Contributor.
First off, let me thank Menzie for the opportunity to “pinch hit” here at Econbrowser. It’s a pleasure to be here. I am Menzie’s colleague in the La Follette School of Public Affairs here at Wisconsin, and my primary area of expertise is the politics of international finance.
Three interesting figures on fuel consumption, job creation, and prospective interest rates.
From CBS News, an excerpt of a Palin twitter message:
“Extreme Greenies:see now why we push’drill,baby,drill’of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?”
In today’s VoxEU, Kati Suominen asks “Did global imbalances cause the crisis?, and surveys the arguments. I recently wrote a survey on the same topic for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization. Here’s my take:
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke last week dismissed the suggestion that the recent surge in gold prices signals some kind of inflationary pressures:
So gold is out there, doing something different from the rest of the commodity group. I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price, but I do think that there is a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now and some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.
I think Bernanke has this exactly right.
As the euro has plummeted against the USD, there’s been concern that efforts to rebalance the global economy will face increasing headwinds. [Bergsten] [Duy]. This worry is only added to by the already widening US trade deficit [1]. In this post, I don’t want to dispute the difficulty of effecting global rebalancing. It was already a difficult task, even before the euro area’s recent debt-related travails. What I do want to do is to put the recent exchange rate movements in perspective. My three observations are as follows:
In some ways the Gulf of Mexico oil spill seems like a replay of the subprime lending disaster. Clever technological innovations blew up in a mess that nobody knew how to control, wreaking devastation on those innocently standing by. The actors and the scenes have changed, but you can’t shake the feeling you’ve been through this nightmare before.
In an interesting post a couple weeks ago, Keith Hennessey critiques the President’s recent speech about employment growth, and presents the following graph, to highlight the gap between where employment is and where it “should” be.
I’m just back from a two day conference at the Norges Bank‘s conference center in the mountains north of Oslo (organized by Karsten Gerdrup, Christian Kascha, Francesco Ravazzolo and Dagfinn Rime). For me as an end-user of econometric methods, this was a great experience. I got to see some recent developments in applying time series methods to problems in macro and finance (and to see Norway for the first time). Here were some of the papers presented and discussed (I’ve omitted the papers that are not posted online).
Yes, we’re still in the economic recovery phase, and yes, it still looks pretty sluggish.