By recent norms this was an unusual employment report in that the data worked the way we would like to see. In the household survey the unemployment rate fell to 7.5% because the labor force rose by 210,000 while employment increased a larger 293,00 so the number of unemployed fell by -83,000.
An old friend dropped by recently and we had a few beers on the back deck. He runs his family’s commercial real-estate business; they own and operate half a dozen or so pretty large properties (and just bought another) — a mall, office buildings, mixed use. I was really curious to talk to him about […]
This if nifty, from The Wall Street Journal: Hat tip Barry Ritholtz. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Lifted from an article in the NYT. In the heat of media debates certain fundamental narratives get lost regarding the tools we use to evaluate policies. Pre-occupation with unemplayment is one of them. While familiar to readers of Angry Bear, it bears reminding ourselves that while ‘economics’ attempts to figure out how the economy works, […]
That is all. FRB: Press Release–Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement–May 1, 2013. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Reader rjs points us to: Everyone’s Missing the Bigger Picture in the Reinhart-Rogoff Debate – But whether you believe that the errors in the RR study are fatal or minor, there is a bigger picture that everyone is ignoring. Initially, RR never pushed an austerity-only prescription. As they wrote yesterday: The only way to break […]
Joseph Rosenberg of Tax Policy Center notes that the chained cpi changes taxes for ppeople as well: Obama Budget Plan Results In ‘Back Door’ Tax Increase For Middle-Class Households: Analysis: For those looking to put the woes of Tax Day behind them, we have some bad news: It’s probably only going to get worse. President […]
Robert Walmann and Kenneth Thomas have traded e=mails with Michael Ash. Michael Ash and Bob Pollin, two economists at PERI, respond to Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in the New York Times: THE debate over government debt and its relationship to economic growth is at the forefront of policy debates across the industrialized world. The […]
Fiscal austerity–or deficit cutting–is the subject of much current debate. As Europe proves, severe austerity can slow growth or lead to recession. Despite periodic slowdowns, the US economy is on a sustainable fiscal path. The deficit is projected to drop below 2.5 percent of GDP by 2017, below its 30-year average, helped partially by the […]
I’d like to push back on Paul Krugman a bit, on this bit in particular: Yes, the government must pay its bills in the long run You hear this from him a lot. And I want to ask him: Paul, are you letting yourself be sucked into the very syndrome that you so bemoan and […]