Government borrowing costs are spiking.
How Come I Don’t Still Hear about the “Worst Recovery Ever”?
Just wondering — where is Ed Lazear when you need him?
Accelerated Employment Growth, Little Inflationary Pressure
Nonfarm payroll employment clocks in substantially above consensus (321,000 vs Bloomberg: mean 230,000, range 140,000 to 275,000), solidifying trend growth. Previous months’ estimates revised upward. Wages continue to rise, but labor costs in productivity adjusted terms are stable.
Keynesian Cassandras? The Sequester Re-Assessed
Professor Tyler Cowen’s anti-Keynesian manifesto has been ably discussed by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis at Mainly Macro. I thought what merited additional attention is Professor Cowen’s first assertion:
1. Keynesians predicted disaster following the American fiscal sequester, and the pace of the recovery accelerated.
A Farewell to Arms?
No more military Keynesianism after G.W. Bush?
A glut of oil?
The world is awash in oil, I’m hearing. The problem is, it’s fairly expensive oil.
Avoiding Lost Decades: European Edition
From Liz Alderman in the NY Times today:
Germany and France Aim to Avert a ‘Lost Decade’
The economy ministers of France and Germany called on Thursday for urgent overhauls and a series of investments in both countries to help prevent them and the eurozone from falling into a stagnation trap.
If Output Is Near Potential, Why Is Inflation so Low?
There is a lot of discussion of how economic slack is fast disappearing, and I expect a lot of push on this view, given continued rapid growth in GDP as reported in today’s second release for 2014Q3. This view seems counter to (1) the CBO estimate of potential GDP and (2) the slow pace of inflation. My suggestion is that there remains a substantial amount of slack out there.
Downgraded: The Macro Outlook in Wisconsin
The Department of Revenue’s Wisconsin Economic Outlook, released last week, details a noticeable deterioration in forecasted economic performance, in just the past eight months.
Lower oil prices and the U.S. economy
For the last 4 years, the national average retail price of gasoline in the United States stayed within a range of $3.25-$4.00 a gallon. But that all changed this fall, with U.S. consumers now paying an average price of $2.82.