Archive for the ‘economy’ Category

The Bond Market Won’t Allow An End To QE Any Time Soon

A couple of days ago I linked to this article which suggested that were Hayek alive today he might well counsel to proceed with caution in its use of unconventional policies, e.g. QE. The gist of the piece was that economists, indeed all social scientists, tend to certitude based on quantitative models which are anything […]

Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement – Freer Trade Or Stalking-Horse

I haven’t paid much attention to the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, the mega-trade deal currently being negotiated among the US and a number of Asia Pacific countries. I’m generally a free trade advocate so I assumed that this amounted to a liberalization of trade terms among the group. Perhaps I was naive. This article from […]

Debt Default Realities

There is seemingly no end to the amount of pixel slaying occurring  in order to paint the scenario for a failure to raise the debt limit. Here’s a link to a post by Felix Salmon which contains a lot of links to the various hyperventilated blovations. Let me be fair to Felix and say that […]

QE And Jobs

Well the usual first Friday of the month jobs report watch is over and no one is happy. The report from the BLS itself was not that bad – 169,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate down to 7.3% – but rather significant downward revisions to the July and August numbers didn’t sit well. Here’s […]

Getting Back To 2007

This chart from the WSJ Real Time Economics blog shows that the output per-person has finally returned to its peak in 2007. It’s not an unimportant milestone even though income and employment have yet to claw their way back. The article notes that taking satisfaction in this number needs to be tempered as we should […]

Summers/Yellen Saga Ending

It’s almost over, I think. I’m talking about the incessant and over-the-top speculation/lobbying/mud slinging which has incredibly accompanied the choice of a new Fed Chairperson. If you’re still tuned into this here is the final analysis of each candidate by AEI scholars. Don’t worry, they aren’t long. I particularly liked this from James Pethokoukis. “Boil […]

Some Recession Talk

Could this guy be right? 1.Inventories — unsold goods — contributed 0.41 percentage points. Final sales rose by just 1.29%. The inventory accumulation will be a drag on future growth. 2. Q1 ’13 growth was revised down from 1.8% to 1.1% (with final sales just 0.17% — virtually flat). The lower Q1 ’13 base (1.8 […]