Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (hat tip: Economist’s View) offered some thoughts Friday about democracy and the Federal Reserve. Both his insights and his errors are instructive.
Some more unwelcome developments
New bankruptcies as consumer sentiment deteriorates.
Revisions: The Global Outlook in the WEO
The IMF released the World Economic Outlook‘s forecasts yesterday. There’s been plenty of coverage, so I won’t recap the main points, but rather focus in on some interesting aspects:
- The rapidity of the downshifting of estimates since January.
- Commodity price prospects and the LDCs.
Visualizing foreclosures
Via Mortgage News Clips, an interesting interactive map of Denver foreclosures in USA Today.
Oil and the Great Moderation
Another interesting paper presented at the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics Symposium that I attended last week was by
Anton Nakov of the Bank of Spain and Andrea Pescatori of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on the role that changes in energy markets may have played in the reduction in GDP and inflation volatility observed since 1984.
Distressing Table of the Day
Here’s the basis for the $945 billion estimate of losses to the financial sector. From the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report:
Downshifting and Reversion in Forecasts: Global Version
The decoupling thesis seems to be ever more out of fashion. From the FT today:
Quite the finish
Amazing championship game for the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.
Nonfarm Payroll Employment: The Movie
By Menzie Chinn
As informative as the nonfarm payroll employment numbers were, of even more interest to me are the revisions. Figure 1 depicts payroll employment estimates from the January (blue), February (red) and March (green) releases.
Regional propagation of business cycles
This is the second of two posts (first can be found here) based on the Craig Hiemstra Memorial Lecture that I’ll be giving in San Francisco on Friday. There I’ll be discussing some ongoing research I’ve been doing with Mike Owyang of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on regional propagation of business cycles.