Last weekend I attended an excellent conference on business cycles hosted by UC Riverside (program details here). Among the many interesting presentations was an update from University of Maryland Professor Boragan Aruoba on the index of current business conditions that he developed with Professor Frank Diebold of the University of Pennsylvania and Federal Reserve economist Chiara Scotti.
The Demise of the Dollar? Should We Worry about Quantitative Easing and Deficit Spending?
Over the weekend, I was working on my long delayed manuscript on exchange rate modeling [0], and pondering how useful the conventional econometric techniques were for making predictions about the future value of the dollar.
Mortgage fraud
Why sell crack when taking money from a careless lender is so much easier and more profitable?
Growth Expectations Stabilize
The WSJ survey of forecasts has just come out [link]. One key finding is that the mean forecast has barely budged since March. In other words, unlike previous months, the perceived outlook has ceased deteriorating.
Initial unemployment claims and the end of recessions
Fed Chair Ben Bernanke a few weeks ago said he saw some green shoots
of favorable developments in financial markets. Does today’s Labor Department report that the seasonally adjusted number of initial claims for unemployment insurance fell by 20,000 workers in the most recent week constitute another?
Guest Blog: The Enduring Trilemma
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.
Phillip Swagel on the Financial Crisis
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.
Some useful resources
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.
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge Winner
Congratulations to King Steve, the winner of the
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge, and to phuphighter, who came in a close second.
The Yield Curve, across Countries, across Time
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: