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
Alan Auerbach and William Gale have a paper on future deficits coming out in the National Tax Journal September issue. They start with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, but point out that the CBO projections require that Congress does something it doesn’t do, nothing. In the current context, this means letting the Bush tax… Read more
Brian Caplan has a nice little model on employment markets that really does explain a lot of what we see: In equilibrium, nice employers hire the rich, and mean employers hire the poor. It makes sense: Nice employers need rich workers they can trust, and poor workers misbehave unless there’s a mean employer on their… Read more
Today’s decline in market values, and particularly in the financial sector, has to reflect more than new employment data. I’m thinking that market participants are coming to see that the risk of at least one sovereign debt default is higher than previously thought. A realistic assessment of the risks and potential impacts on the Euro,… Read more
Today’s report that initial jobless claims unexpectedly “shot up by 25,000 to 471,000 last week” has hit the stock markets hard. I don’t know why the claim is unexpected or why the stock market reacted so strongly. Volatility is to be expected in a slow recovery, and that’s what we and many other forecasters have… Read more
The debate over the repeal of California’s global-warming regulation, AB32, has degenerated into a shouting match, each side claiming economic ruin if the other side wins. A couple of long-dead French economists can help us think about the debate. The great French economist Leon Walras (1834-1910) showed that perfect markets result in an allocation of… Read more
Tonight I’ll be speaking to a group working on saving the Ventura River. The river once had a very large steelhead run, and I’m told a salmon run. Today, it is home to the homeless. I would love to see the river restored to a more pristine state, and I would love to have steelhead… Read more
People who follow me know that I think little of Paul Krugman as a person. He was a brilliant economist, one who changed the way economists thinks about international economics, and his Nobel Prize was well deserved. That was a long time ago. He then provided a service to all of us by writing books… Read more
The question has merit, but I came to it by a roundabout process. I was thinking about how our savings rate is low and falling. After all, we have lots of reasons to save: We’ve lost huge amounts of wealth over the past couple of years, and many people, especially Baby Boomers anticipating retirement, are… Read more
Europe has created a $1 trillion bailout fund. The United States Federal Reserve Bank has apparently agreed to unlimited currency swaps to support the bailout effort. By comparison, Freddie Mac’s request for another $8.4 billion looks pretty small, but they are all symptoms of the same disease. Let’s call the disease bailoutitis. It is not… Read more
The current VC Reporter has a great article on two competing downtown Ventura projects. The proposals are for Ventura’s iconic intersection at California and Main, and each would be a huge innovation for the City. The smaller proposal is for a $19 million mixed use project with 29 residential units priced from $400,000 to $850,000.… Read more
