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
California has now had three consecutive months of job gains, and the State’s unemployment rate has been declining, albeit slowly. That’s an improvement, but it’s not time to break out the bubbly. For one thing, those job gains have been pretty darn small, and they haven’t been enough to drive down the unemployment rate. Outmigration… Read more
Forecasting is always difficult. It is even more difficult when the data keep changing. This year, we’ve been plagued by very large adjustments to GDP data. Most have been downward adjustments, but a few have been upward adjustments. Productivity has been the source of most of the changes. Jobs data get revised too, but we… Read more
I’m often asked about how regional forecasts are constructed. The fact is that different outfits construct regional forecasts differently. At the lowest level of rigor, a forecaster may just discuss broad trends, perhaps referring to historical data, but not provide a numerical forecast. These forecasts are not without value. Improved understanding the general sweep of… Read more
The No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002. Among other things, it required standardized testing of students, beginning in 2003. The scores are used to evaluate the quality of the schools. It sounds reasonable. Congress certainly thought so. It was co-authored in the Senate by Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Judd Gregg (R-NH), while… Read more
I don’t think I’ve ever watched a compete 35 minute internet video. I haven’t been to a movie for well over a decade and probably less than 10 times over the 40 years I’ve been married. We have a TV at home, but no cable or antenna. The kids use it to play Wii or… Read more
A few days ago, I attended a presentation on by David Flaks. David is the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation’s (LAEDC) Chief Operating Officer, and he was discussing LAEDC’s new LA County Strategic Plan. A few hours later, I was called by a Ventura County Star reporter, Stephanie Hoops. She asked for my thoughts on… Read more
The October 29, 2009 issue of Time Magazine had an article titled “Why California is America’s Future.” I sure hope not. California is fast becoming a post-industrial hell for almost everyone except the gentry class, their best servants and the public sector. We only need a few numbers to demonstrate that California is clearly on… Read more
Europe has been in the news a lot lately. One day it has a plan to, temporarily at least, deal with the debt problems of delinquent members, and markets climb. The next day there is a glitch and markets fall. What is going on here? Why are markets so spooky? We’re witnessing what are almost… Read more
In a newsletter about three months ago, I acknowledged some improving economic conditions in Oregon, but counseled that it was no time to become complacent. That turns out to have been right on. Since then, seasonally adjusted job growth has dramatically slowed, and seasonally adjusted unemployment has increased. When Oregon had some good job numbers,… Read more
Today’s jobs data release was below our forecast, and that is bad. It is even worse, when one considers the productivity data released earlier in the week. That report showed that productivity has fallen in each of the past three consecutive quarters. This is the most sustained decline since 1979. Productivity used to have a… Read more
