How bad a year was 2020?
During the year, the United States economy lost a net 9.4 million jobs — 6.2% of the jobs it had at the end of […]
Recovery, Expansion, and an Old Normal Yield Curve
In December of 2019, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 3.6% and prime age labor force participation, at 82.9%, was at an 11 year high. Today, December 2020 jobs figures […]
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Sorkin: Lachlan Murdoch and Jason Kilar on the Future of Fox and CNNView More
Niko Kotsoulas, '16: "FM&I class helped…
Sequencing a malaria mosquito’s motherline
Closing the Fire Station, to Motivate Less Smoking in Bed
In the spring of 2009, amid the darkest moments of the Great Recession, I published a book and a blogpost. The book, reviewed here, championed the notion that mainstream […]
Sean McGrath, '16: "Out of all the classes…
What Do GDP Figures Show?
The United States, unlike many countries, releases its GDP figures as annual rates. That makes no sense now, when there are clearly forces at work that will not continue for […]
The Jobs That Are Not Back
Friday’s employment report indicates almost half of the jobs that vanished in the Pandemic have been recovered.. But there are some industries where there has been hardly any recovery – […]
Ellis Flannery, ’17: "helped me ace my interviews and ultimately succeed…
Scientists discover a dynamic cellular defense against breast cancer invasion
Will the economy get worse?
Source: The Conference Board
Remember the sunny forecasts when the Pandemic began? This was to be a brief recession, followed by a “V” shaped recovery.
You could see that forecast […]
Jeremy Fraenkel, '17: "…more than just a regular econ. class…
The Worst Recession On Record, By One Measure
It is tempting to look at the continued recovery of the labor market in July and be encouraged – even if there are indications that August may see a reversal. […]
Squeezing States and Cities
One number stands out in today’s estimate of second quarter GDP, and it isn’t the overall real GDP decline of 32.9%, on an annualized basis, even though the headlines will […]
How’s President Trump doing on the economy?
The new Quinnipiac Poll, released Wednesday, finds that – for the first time this year – more people disapprove than approve of the way President Trump is handling the economy. […]
538 survey of macroeconomists
The 538 webpage, part of ABC news and originally set up by Nate Silver is running an ongoing biweekly survey of academic macroeconomic forecasters about the coronavirus recession. Allan Timmermann […]
Will Older Workers Stay Home?
Many older Americans reacted to the financial crisis of 2008 by deciding not to retire. Some who had retired went back to work if they could do so. And that […]
Inside Baseball
Seasonal adjustment is one of the more obscure potential casualties of the pandemic recession. A well known problem with seasonal adjustment is that an outlier observation will lead the seasonal […]
A Lost Four Years, But Better Than Hoover
The United States may be on the verge of an unfortunate accomplishment rarely reached in the last century: a presidential four-year term in which real per capita GDP was lower […]
A Tale of Two Sectors
The private sector added jobs in May almost everywhere in the United States. The public sector lost jobs, also almost everywhere.
Those two trends seem likely to persist in the […]
538 survey of macroeconomists
The 538 webpage, part of ABC news and originally set up by Nate Silver, has just done a survey of academic macroeconomic forecasters about the coronavirus recession. Allan Timmermann at […]
Republican View of Economy: Getting Worse, But Still Better than Obama
Just how bad is the economic outlook? These days the answer seems to depend on the politics of the person being asked.
The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index is released weekly, […]
Beware of Seasonal Adjustment
By Kevin Heerdt and Jonathan H. Wright
Economic data released by the government and other entities are being distorted by normally acceptable statistical methods. The extreme economic data that are […]
Votes, deaths and layoffs
There are 50 states, but only 13 where the 2016 presidential election was decided by a margin of less than eight percentage points. Six of them went for Hillary Clinton […]
Market Volatility
Get ready for another crazy month on Wall Street. Months like March tend to come in pairs, at least as far as volatility goes.
Daily moves of 4% or more […]
The best kind of stimulus
No sooner was the ink dry on the March 27 $2 trillion stimulus package than Washington began work on the next stimulus. This is the right thing to do. Deficit […]
COVID-19 Data: Signal versus Noise
Two burning questions confront all of us:
How big is our public health problem?
How sharp is our economic retrenchment?
We think that the toolkit of economic forecasters has something […]
Embracing Distancing and Cushioning the Blow to the Economy
The global COVID-19 outbreak now sports exponential growth rates for cases and deaths on every continent save Antarctica. Students of the economy must add that we are also in the […]
Oily Disaster
The United States has become the world’s largest oil producer. That honor is likely to vanish, and with it a lot of companies.
If so – and it is almost […]
The Saudis, the Russians, the Chinese…and the Greens, Four Dimensional Chess in the Time of Corona
Crude oil prices plunged on Monday, as Saudi Arabia has announced that they will ramp up production to punish recalcitrant OPEC members, including and especially Russia. Rising supply alongside a […]
Trump stocks
President Trump has frequently pointed to the performance of the stock market in praising his own performance, although not in the past week when markets worldwide came down with (fears […]
China’s 2018 Economic Slowdown: Much Worse than the Official Tally
By Robert Barbera and Yingyao Hu
Our nighttime illumination estimate for 2018 Chinese growth, 4.2%, is roughly one third weaker than the Chinese official claim of a 6.5% climb for […]
Memo to the Fed: Remember 2008
One thing I learned during more than 40 years as a journalist is that the power to set the terms of the debate sometimes can be decisive in determining the […]
Gangbusters Jobs Growth and No Fed Tightening. A Snapshot Unlikely to Persist.
President Trump tweeted on Christmas Eve that he was “all alone (poor me).” It was a sentiment with which Fed Chairman Jerome Powell could sympathize.
As 2018 came to a […]
China’s Slowdown: More There than Meets the Eye
By Bob Barbera and Yingyao Hu.
If there isn’t light in the 21st century world – or at least not as much light as economic statistics would suggest there should […]
Zero Bound
The outlook for growth in employment and corporate earnings over the next few years is headed down.
The problem is not what the Federal Reserve will do, or what a […]
Workers Return, Oldsters Retire, and the Jobless Rate Continues to Fall.
What did We Learn from Recent Monetary Policy Performance?
A growing chorus of commentators are now issuing warnings about additional Fed tightening in light of the flattening Treasury yield curve. Despite clear evidence that job growth in the U.S. […]
While visions of Bitcoins danced in their heads
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