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
The markets are reacting enthusiastically to today’s jobs and unemployment data. I’m not sure why. Dan discussed the jobs data and the problems with seasonal adjustment in the previous post. There is also a problem in the unemployment data.
I always figured that the administration would take credit for any eventual economic recovery, but I also figured that they would wait for the recovery. Wrong. Cristina Romer, perhaps buoyed by yesterday’s GDP release and today’s job data, says that the stimulus is working.
