CERF Blog

California’s jobs report, released Friday the 16th, showed that the California economy is still bumping along the bottom of a serious recession.  The various indicators, for the month of September, show only slight improvements over August.  There was a slight improvement in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate from 12.3 percent to 12.2 percent.  There was… Read more

The Economic news is mostly negative today with Consumer Confidence dropping below the consensus forecast. MGIC, the nation’s third largest mortgage insurer, posted a third quarter $518 million loss after a record number of homeowners failed to meet their mortgage payments. Bank of America posted a $2.2 billion loss, although $400 million of that was… Read more

United States third quarter foreclosure rates rose substantially, 23 percent higher than last year, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Almost a million homes received a default, auction notice, or were repossessed by banks in 2009 quarter 3. About one in every 136 U.S. households received a filing, the highest since January 2005. Analysis by the Amherst… Read more

By my count, and I could be wrong, 36 Oregon economist signed a letter supporting the Legislature’s tax increases in response to the State’s budget problem. These are the key paragraphs: “ Cutting state spending reduces in-state aggregate demand, virtually dollar-for-dollar. Some forms of state spending, particularly in the area of health care, bring matching… Read more

Joel Kotkin forwarded this article in the Oregon Environmental News.  Seems that baby boomers will retire to rural communities in big numbers, for maybe 15 years. This is likely to be particularly important in Central Oregon, and it is a mixed blessing. The baby boomer’s impact on Central Oregon’s economy will persist long after the… Read more

Tim Herdt has a piece today on the politics of legalizing marijuana: “Forget Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. It says here that the most interesting political issue in California next June might not be the Republican and Democratic nominations for governor, but possibly a ballot proposition with the following title:… Read more

So true: “Establishing financial stability—in addition to price stability and growth—is the essential role of the central bank. Achieving this goal in a way that avoids moral-hazard distortions, as with the too-big-to-fail finance institutions, and prevents another bubble in the next years will surely be one of the greatest challenges ever faced by the Fed.”… Read more

Dan started this, but he has some minor surgery today. Kirk and Bill finished it: CERF released its first United States and California forecast last week. The United States and California forecasts are pessimistic relative to consensus. Why? In part, it is because so many forecasters seem to be using a model with a high… Read more

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

The FED’s response to the last year’s financial collapse has drawn criticism from all fronts. We’ve contributed to the criticism in small ways. In particular, we don’t like the idea of too-big-to-fail and were unhappy when companies were saved from the axe of failure in the marketplace. Bernanke, though, has brought real and valuable innovations… Read more

In November of 2008, we substantially revised our forecast of mid-year 2009 United States year-on-year job growth rate from 0.3 to a fall of about four percent. At the time, we felt like we were in the midst of a regime-shift to a different state of economic affairs. This new state was one characterized by… 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

Mark Zandi declared “the recession is over” on Tuesday September 1, 2009. All of the economists at CERF would like this to be true. However, we suspect that this is not true. Mark’s declaration was based in part on the ISM manufacturing activity index data release. The economy has benefited from expenditures on vehicles in… 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