The June employment report can be found here. Payroll employment grew by 146 thousand. With a similar estimated increase per the Household Survey, employment growth matched population growth with the employment to population ratio remaining at 62.7%. Now you may have heard that the unemployment rate fell from 5.1% to 5.0% and wondered if that […]

Jonah Goldberg comments over at NRO’s The Corner is turning out to be an efficient ways of keeping up with the right’s reaction to the possibility that Karl Rove leaked the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. At first, it was denial. Now Mr. Goldberg has evolved to the “so what” stage. In […]

I guess we should not be surprised that the National Review is expressing jingoist noises, but I found Andrew McCarthy’s It’s War, or Isn’t It interesting on a couple of levels. One is that most of us in this nation and in Europe have realized there is a war against Al Qaeda since September 11, […]

In the wake of this morning’s horrible terrorist attacks in central London, it’s natural to notice that the terrorists chose to target London’s financial and tourist industries. In that respect, this attack was very much like the attack on the World Trade Center. But what are the economic effects of such attacks likely to be? […]

The terrorists have now hit London, which leaves me speechless. I’m suspecting that John Gibson would like to retract what he said yesterday: Paris was exactly the right place to pick and the Olympic committee screwed up. Why? Simple. It would have been a three-week period where we wouldn’t have had to worry about terrorism. […]

Today’s news of increased layoffs raises the question of why the Federal Reserve is allowing short-term interest rates to rise. David Altig and Mark Thoma offer the explanation that perhaps the Federal Reserve believes we are near full employment so that if the Federal Reserve allows aggregate demand growth to outstrip the increase in potential […]

This weekend began with an apparent bombshell from Lawrence O’Donnell during the taping of the McLaughlin Group: Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury. While […]

After a nice long weekend, a little reading … NY Times on Australia: Hole in the Housing Bubble The Australian housing boom has come to a halt, in a move that many see as the first signs of the end to a housing bubble, not just in Australia, but also in the U.S. Baltimore Sun: […]

Do I and Mark Thoma need to purchase Rational Exuberance to understand what Michael Mandel is trying to say? Perhaps this will give us some clue. Mandel’s first post drew my fire as he seemed to be suggesting economists like Paul Krugman and Mark Thoma did not realize the importance of intellectual capital – defined […]

Inspired by PGL’s reference to the debate between Nouriel Roubini and Art Laffer, I visited Laffer’s house to talk to him. But before I had a chance to ask him why he thinks the Laffer curve (the idea that cutting taxes will actually lead to higher tax revenues) actually has any empirical relevance to the […]