Several chapters of the IMF’s semi-annual research document are now available online, in advance of the IMF-Bank meetings.
The Yuan on the Move: An Update
And a bit on the IMF’s revised forecast for the US.
From Reuters, “U.S.’s Paulson praises China on currency progress”:
Downturn in auto sales continues
Automobile sales do not bode well for first-quarter GDP.
Maybe not so nonsensical after all
How far will house prices fall? Implications from the latest WSJ survey.
NCAA basketball: Round 4
Sixteen entries in the
2008 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge correctly picked all of the Final Four teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, including our two leaders who also correctly picked all of the Elite Eight finalists.
“Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World”
From Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World, March 25.
Satellite imagery from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals that a 13,680 square kilometer (5,282 square mile) ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica.
NCAA basketball: Round 3
And after Round 3 of the
2008 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge we have not one but two entries (from N. Klingenstein and H. Parsley) that correctly picked all of the Elite Eight finalists. How they knew Davidson would get there is beyond me.
Recessions at the state level
I’ve been invited to give the keynote lecture at the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics Annual Symposium next week at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. I plan on presenting results of some ongoing research with Mike Owyang of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on regional propagation of business cycles. This is the first of two posts that describe some of our findings about how recessions differ and seem to propagate across different states and regions.
Would you like anything else with that coffee, Ben?
Last week we received some new data linking commodity prices to the decisions of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Recoupling, Monetary Policy Divergence, and the Dollar
At the risk of losing my audience by skipping over the the record housing price decline, and an outsized drop in the consumer confidence index, I’m going to focus on what seems like old news (but is being reflected in current news on the dollar), namely the OECD reduction in growth forecasts for the G-7 economies. The euro area economy is slated to do better than the US economy in 2008H1, but that’s not saying much.