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 tweeted the title of this blog entry the other day and got a bit of pushback. My tweet was in response to this Yahoo! article. It seems that bank regulators want to control bank executives’ salaries as part of a plan to reduce risk taking at banks. Of course, the problem is that the… Read more
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece by John Cogan, John Taylor and Volker Wieland. Cogan and Taylor are famous and respected economists. Volker is younger. He was Taylor’s student and at the Fed when I was there. I found him careful, thoughtful, and smart. Their piece is titled “The Stimulus Didn’t Work.” They provide… Read more
Today’s news will be dominated by the BLS’s unemployment data release. I’m sure we’ll have more to say on that. Right now, I’d like to discuss a less-publicized data release, one that probably has more information than the unemployment data. Yesterday, the FDIC released bank charge-off data, and it was disappointing and scary. I’ve posted… Read more
Over the weekend I read this article. It seems that Barney Frank and Ron Paul, normally not allies, have gotten together and proposed a law requiring an audit of the Federal Reserve System and limiting the Fed’s lending options. I tweeted on it, calling it a really really bad idea. I was tempted to say… Read more
Kurgman has had several recent blog entries and an op-ed ( http://tiny.cc/7S3of ) on the virtues of government debt. He compares the current stimulus to that of the 1930’s, WWII, and the Cold War. He provides the “comforting” statistic that we had government debt of 109% of GDP at the end of WWII. He argues… Read more
The Pacific Research Institute released a new study yesterday. The report, titled “Assessing the State of the Golden State,” analyzes indicators for income, labor, migration, and entrepreneurship and compares California to every other state. Here’s a link to the report: http://tiny.cc/huFh5 How does California rank in this study? The short answer is poor. By these… Read more
This is a slow week for economic news. I was thinking about how different things are from last August. Last year we were approaching the most serious economic crisis of our life. Economic storm clouds were building, the government was bailing out firms, and everyone was preparing for the worst. Except, September was worse than… Read more
Two Los Angeles Times articles today highlight California’s problems. One article discusses the falloff of activity at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports (http://tiny.cc/eFHbx). The other discusses the expected closing of California’s last auto plant (http://tiny.cc/ini6Z). Some would argue that these events reflect the worldwide economic decline and have little to do with California.… Read more
Most people are concerned about potential inflation, but deflation is the immediate worry. It is easy to see why the concern for inflation. Big deficits and big increases in the monetary base usually lead to inflation. However, inflation is not inevitable. For inflation to occur, increases in the monetary base have to be translated to… Read more
One last comment on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) employment and unemployment data release on Friday, I promise. I haven’t seen any comments on the “Long Term Unemployed.” These are people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. According to the release, there were just under 5 million people (4,934,000) who had… Read more
