Bill Watkins, Ph.D.
Bill Watkins, Founding Director of CERF, has been providing accurate, unflinching forecasts about the economic pulse of California, western states and the rest of the United States, for more than 15 years. He is a plain-spoken, no-holds-barred economist who studies the data and tells it like it is.
“Bill Watkins has the enviable ability to provide the simple-to-grasp explanations that are based on rigorous analysis of complex things. Sometimes it seems that we within the academy forget that our job is to make things easier to understand, not more difficult.”
Read BioCERF Blog: Posts by Bill Watkins
I just read paper The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks by Christina Romer and David Romer. It’s in the June 2010 issue of The American Economic Review (AER), the industry’s top peer-reviewed journal. Being in the AER is a guarantee that the paper is rigorous and… Read more
Bloomberg has the following headline and article: “Home Vacancies Rise as U.S. Ownership Falls to Lowest in Decade.” Most will take this as bad news, and it is, but not for the reasons many will think. Most will lament the decline in home ownership, as if it is somehow a slide away from the American… Read more
I hope we’re a bit farther along than this, but maybe not: “epidemiology in the nineteenth century was much like economics in the twentieth century: a subject of intense public interest and concern, in which theories abounded but where the scope for controlled experiment was limited” Cooper
I was listening to Bloomberg radio this morning on the way to work. They were a bunch of happy folks there. The markets are up, and some earning reports are up. Then, they came to the consumer confidence numbers, which came in worse than the consensus forecast. Nothing here to disturb the Bloomberg team. They… Read more
Previously published on NewGeography.com on 6/19/2010 The most fanatical Keynesians are losing their composure. Brad DeLong, a prominent Berkeley economist and Keynesian, is virtually yelling that “We Need Bigger Deficits Now!”, emphasis his. Paul Krugman does DeLong one better, calling proponents of fiscal responsibility madmen. They are following the gospel of John Maynard Keynes, who… Read more
Previously published on NewGeography.com on 7/11/2010 A year ago we were hearing all about green shoots. Analysts claimed to find them everywhere. Today, we never see the term. In fact, there seems to be a growing malaise. By the end of June the first quarter’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimate was revised downward a full… Read more
The California Builders Association announced today that California’s new home sales fell 46 percent in May over the previous year. This is a big decline from an already weak market. The question, of course, is what caused the decline. The easy answer is the expiration of federal incentives on April 30th, but that is not… Read more
DJ is one of my dearest friends. He was one of the first people to befriend me when I moved to a new city as a high-school junior. He was there for the debriefs after high-school dates, and I was there for his. He was there for an awful lot of firsts, none of which… Read more
The National Venture Capital Association issued a couple of reports recently. One is on venture capital fund raising. The other is a report on a survey of venture capital professionals. Each of them make for ugly reading, if you would like to see a robust recovery and dynamic economy. Here are a few key findings:… Read more
NASSCO-General Dynamics announced that it was laying off 290 workers. Here’s part of what the Union-Tribune had to say: “NASSCO-General Dynamics , the last major shipbuilder on the West Coast, laid off 290 of its 4,100 workers in San Diego on Monday because of a downturn in business and fluctuations in the repair work it… Read more
