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
Dan Walters has a piece on California’s proposed licensing of interior designers, and I recommend you read it. Here’s his concluding paragraphs: Is there any public interest need for such licensing? If an interior designer botches a job – painting a wall magenta instead of puce or some such – it’s not a matter of life… Read more
Brian Caplan was writing about the Charter Cities, which he likes as a second-best choice because: The first-best solution to global poverty, therefore, is for the First World to allow much higher levels of immigration. Unfortunately, despite its low absolute level (annual U.S. immigration is well under 1% of its population), immigration is already extremely unpopular. For… Read more
Veronique de Rugy is a provocative woman, and a smart one. Here’s what she said in a piece on women: Improving the lot of American women means lowering marginal tax rates, abolishing many workplace regulations, increasing the number of low-skilled immigrants, and ending the drug war. That’s what we call counter intuitive, but she makes… Read more
The headline is “AP: Wells Fargo customers soon will pay $7 checking account fee.” It’s accompanied by a picture of Wells Fargo’s CEO, a picture that makes him look like he eats babies for breakfast. The first paragraph reads: Customers in California and six other Western states soon will pay a $7 checking account fee,… Read more
I recently had a piece on immigration a San Diego’s Union Tribune. It is about how an increase in legal immigration could be an economic spark, and I thought I was the only one thinking about the topic. Turns out I was wrong. There’s an outfit called the Partnership for a New American Economy, and… Read more
Veronique De Rugy at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has a nice piece Debt Grows at a Faster Rate Than Economy for Foreseeable Future. My working definition of sustainability: when something is growing slower than the economy, it is sustainable. Usually, we’re talking about prices, but debt works too. Something will have to change.
Shelly Sullivan has a piece, Cap-and-trade is not a budget solution, in Capital Weekly. It’s well worth reading. She’s correct, of course, but she fails to mention a key p0int: When most economists support cap-and-trade schemes, the point is to use the proceeds to offset existing discretionary taxes. That would minimize the economic costs of the regulation. California’s proposal,… Read more
I read an article yesterday that claimed that the FED has already initiated QE3, without an announcement. Today, I had time to check the data. Here’s a chart from FRED: There has been a recent increase in the base, but we’re only back to our previous high. We could be seeing the initial stages of… Read more
I just finished John Taylor’s new book, First Principles. It’s a very good and fast read. It’s a little over 200 pages, and not a derivative in it. I don’t think there is even an explicit formula in it. Taylor writes very well, especially for an academic economist. Maybe that is from all his years… Read more
Louisiana Congressman Charles Boustany has introduced a bill banning withdrawals of welfare funds from ATMs at liquor stores, casinos, and strip clubs. Politicians do this sort of thing every now and then. It wasn’t that long ago that California’s legislature, in its own spasm of self-righteous Puritanism, was imposing its own, very similar, controls. This… Read more
