By Hiro Ito
Today, we’re fortunate to have Hiro Ito, Associate Professor of Economics at Portland State University as a guest blogger.
While the current global crisis does not show any sign of bottoming out, policy makers around the globe are reevaluating international macroeconomic policies and discussing the post-crisis future of the international financial architecture — as we saw in the recent G20 meeting.
I’m behind the curve on recommending Phillip Swagel‘s BPEA paper on the Administration’s response to the financial crisis. But today he talked to the students in my macro course, and his presentation just reinforced my view that his account is one that everbody should read.
Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (paper here) document the usefulness of Google Trends and Google Insights for Search for purposes of updating assessments of current economic magnitudes. I see that Mark Thoma also calls attention to this intriguing data source.
Scott Irwin has collected an archive with some of the difficult-to-find classics in commodity research.
Congratulations to King Steve, the winner of the
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge, and to phuphighter, who came in a close second.
A year and half ago, I asked “Does it matter that yield curves (around the world) are sloping downward?” (October 12, 2007). I included this snapshot of term premia in the post:
Light vehicles sold in the U.S. last month were down 37% from March 2008, whereas February sales had been 41% below year-earlier values. Does a February-to-March increase and smaller year-over-year drop mean that we’ve turned the corner?
Just a quick post to highlight the OECD’s recent forecast [0] for the US (-7.2% SAAR decline in 2009Q1), and e-forecasting’s latest take (6.8% SAAR decline in 2009M03).
In a follow-up on my earlier post, I’d now like to discuss the second part of my paper, Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08, which I presented today at a conference at the Brookings Institution. Here I’ll review the role that the oil price shock may have played in causing the economic recession that began in 2007:Q4.
I will be presenting my latest research paper, Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08, at a conference today at the Brookings Institution. Here I review some results from that paper about what caused oil prices to rise so spectacularly in 2007-08 only to decline even more dramatically afterward.
As the G-20 leaders meet in London, one graph should remind the representatives of these disparate countries of their shared interest in restoring the health of the financial systems of the developed countries.