If it’s summer, it must be time for another energy bill, for which the Senate seems to have followed the strategy of Captain Renault to round up the usual suspects.
One nice thing when Congress keeps coming up with the same old ideas is that it allows us pundits to save energy by recycling our old comments on CAFE standards, ethanol mandates, and anti-gouging legislation.
I was pleased to participate in the latest
Wall Street Journal Econoblog
with Mark Zandi, Chief Economist and co-founder of Moody’s Economy.com. Here’s a brief preview of what you can
find over at the WSJ.
Some delayed reflections on the May import/export price release, and how to interpret the data in light of the empirics of exchange rate pass through.
I wouldn’t read too much into the new starts, permits, and sentiment data, but I don’t take them as very encouraging.
There’s a temptation to view the upward revision to the current account balance, and the components thereof, as yet more evidence that the US external situation is in better shape than commonly perceived.
Don’t count on running your Hummer on gasoline from oil shale just yet.
Rising rates look scary, but I still read it as good news.
The dramatic upward move of long-term interest rates gives me an opportunity to look back on some of the predictions made on the basis of the inversion of the yield curve, and what might be in store next.
The Treasury released its report International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies yesterday. As expected, the Treasury declined to declare China a currency manipulator. On the same day, four senators submitted legislation to tie Treasury’s hands in terms of the actions it can take against countries with “misaligned” currencies.
There has been some discussion recently about discrepancies between different government estimates of the state of the labor market. Although a legitimate issue has been raised, there has also been a bit of misunderstanding.