I heard John Taylor, a respected Macroeconomist with an extensive academic research record and lots of actual public policy experience, speak on Friday. The full text of Professor Taylor’s speech is here. Flanked by a large number of distinguished economists, he spoke about monetary and fiscal policy, making a distinction between rules-based policy and discretion-based… Read more

Written January 6, 2011 The Allied Social Science Associations meetings are currently being held in Denver. These meetings are the largest set of Economics meetings on the planet. At 2:30pm today, I had 65 different sessions to choose from! And there are a similar plethora of sessions to choose from at nine different time-slots, three… Read more

Recent Retail Sales data, October and November, have been relatively strong for an economy that is barely recovering from the Great Recession. Recent personal consumption expenditures, the national account data that is much broader than Retail Sales, surprised me with a strong growth rate of 2.8 percent per annum during quarter 3. I have blogged… Read more

The Federal Reserve released its third quarter Flow of Funds report, which includes measures of debt accumulation and household sector wealth. This data is fundamental to the applied New Classical macroeconomist as wealth is believed to be a key driver of consumption. United States households continued to rebuild their balance sheets during the third quarter.… Read more

The Labor Department’s jobs report for November indicates that job growth has slowed and unemployment has risen from October. We had forecasted a gain of 50 thousand jobs and a steady unemployment rate. The actuals were a gain of 39 thousand jobs and a rise in the unemployment rate from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent.… Read more

The BEA’s second estimate of United States third quarter economic growth was released this morning. The revision from the first estimate of 2.0 percent growth was an increase of half a percent to 2.5 percent growth. The revisions were primarily the result of upward revisions to personal consumption expenditures, exports, and state/local government spending. The… Read more

The 2009 state-by-state real GDP growth rate estimates were released by the BEA this morning. Given that 2009 was a pivotal year in the Great Recession, we saw lots of variability. There were 38 state economies that experienced contractions, most led by the construction and durables goods manufacturing sectors. The average across all 50 states… Read more

The BLS provided the October Consumer Price Index release today.  The October core CPI year-on-year growth was 0.6 percent.  This is the lowest growth of this measure since 1957.  This rate of growth is low enough that the Fed is concerned that price growth is too low.  In an economy characterized by weak demand, weak… Read more

Despite positive United States economic growth since the third quarter of 2009, job growth continues to be weak, indeed negative until recently. Separately, I have argued that the Fed should be patient and wait for households to rebuild their balance sheets, a process that will take quite some time to complete, and probably can’t be… Read more

United States non-farm jobs fell by 95,000 jobs in September driven by a 159,000 loss of government jobs that was offset by a 64,000 gain in private sector payroll jobs. The government job losses resulted from Census cutbacks and continued local government sector declines. Non-farm job growth has been negative for four months now, i.e.… Read more