Today’s NYT article suggests apocalypse (very) soon:
…the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.
Do we really need to worry so much in the short term?
Factors in local house price declines
UCSD Ph.D. candidate Sam Dastrup has completed a very interesting study with his advisor Professor Richard Carson of what accounts for differences across U.S. communities in the magnitude of the decline in real estate prices that we’ve seen over the last several years.
Baselines, Counterfactuals and the Stimulus
China, the Renminbi, and Global Imbalances: A Quantitative View
GDP: Revisions and Forecasts
There’s been some discussion of how the GDP estimates for 2009Q3 might be revised downward in light of the September trade release [1]. e-Forecasting has presented its latest estimates up to October, and Macroeconomic Advisers through September. Macroeconomic Advisers writes:
Receiver operating characteristics curve
Travis Berge and Oscar Jorda of the University of California, Davis have an interesting new paper on statistical criteria for distinguishing economic expansions from recessions.
Assessing the Impact of Government Policy on Widget Consumption and Widget Sector Capital Usage
Let supply and demand for widgets (y) be given by the following two equations, respectively:
(1) yt = αt + β x t + ε t
(2) yt = γ + δ x t + Γ z t + u t
The Global Surface Temperature Anomaly
Commodity inflation
Why are the prices of so many commodities rising in an economy that seems to remain quite weak?
Politico Does Economic Analysis…
Be afraid; be very afraid.
From “‘Created or saved’ doesn’t add up”, by Joseph Lawler:
…[t]he “created or saved” numbers are meaningless. The administration purposefully devised the metric to be nebulous. Without a counterfactual, showing the trend of unemployment in the absence of the stimulus, it is impossible to know how many jobs the stimulus saved.