You know that people are a bit on edge regarding China’s exchange rate policy when this story is one of the top news items (at least as of 1pm EDT) on the Financial Times: China says no change in monetary policy China’s renminbi currency traded briefly outside its tightly controlled band on Friday, triggering a […]
Apparently, February’s incredibly low savings rate was not the bottom for the US, because in March it went even lower. Since I’m in a charty kind of mood today, here’s the picture… (Note: the bump at the end of 2004 is due to Microsoft’s one-time dividend payout in December.) This incorporates the most recent data […]
So what’s the deal with inventories, anyway? You may have been wondering a bit about that in the wake of yesterday’s GDP report, in which inventory changes played such an important role; one-third of economic growth in the first quarter of 2005 was simply due to firms building up their stocks of inventories. Studying inventory […]
Back in 2003, Bruce Bartlett criticized the Smetters-Gokhale use of present value analysis but now he seems to like such calculations. To be fair, I have used such calculations, while Max Sawicky notes that they look like ginned-up large numbers unless put in the context of the present value of future GDP over the same […]
Are you tired of having the radical right preach to us about what God allegedly wants in the political arena? Tax Analysts reports on this story from Sierra Leone: Tax officials in Sierra Leone offended the country’s Christian population after launching an advertising campaign on April 25 that claimed that Jesus Christ wanted them to […]
This morning the BEA reported that its advance estimate of GDP growth in the beginning of 2005 came in somewhat below expectations, which were for about 3.5% growth: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate […]
In my view, CalculatedRisk is the blog’s leading authority on the housing market. Having read the latest from John Tamny, James Grant’s Forbes article is something we might all read as well. But Tamny disagrees with Mr. Grant’s assertion that higher interest rates tend to reduce the value of houses: Though the prime-lending rate rose […]
I’m not a regular follower of durable goods orders, and I don’t generally pay much attention to whether it goes up or down in any particular month. This morning’s release was slightly more eye-catching than usual, however; durable goods orders have now fallen for three consecutive months, which starts to look more like a trend […]
Shortly after reading PGL’s healthcare post, I came across this in a Wired article, Cracking the Real Estate Code (should be available here on May 5th), by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of Freakonomics. Their Wired article describes how markets can go awry in the face of significant asymmetric information, primarily noting that real […]
Has the Fed under Alan Greenspan been so sanguine about the US economy’s potential problems that its behavior verges on the irresponsible? Some economists think so, and their voices seem to be getting louder. For years now Paul Krugman has written that he thinks Greenspan is more of a cheerleader for the Bush administration than […]