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November 30, 2006
Home sales down further
Data on October new home sales released yesterday by the Census Bureau suggest that I may be proved to have been wrong in thinking that new home sales had already hit bottom.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 09:05 AM permalink | Comments (13)
November 28, 2006
Downshifting and Reversion in Forecasts
My post on CEA's forecast discussed the similarity between the Administration's forecast and the Society of Professional Forecasters forecast. What can we learn from recent SPF forecasts, in the wake of decelerating growth.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 07:10 AM permalink | Comments (25)
November 26, 2006
Housing: speculative bubble or fundamentals?
Caclulated Risk had some interesting observations this week about why forecasts for housing differ so widely across analysts.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 11:26 AM permalink | Comments (22)
November 25, 2006
Will the Dollar Plunge? Would that Be So Bad?
Yesterday's dollar plunge unnerved markets. What's the likelihood of a sustained, drastic decline?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:30 AM permalink | Comments (21)
November 24, 2006
Litvinenko
Martin Kelly is your source for news on the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
Posted by James Hamilton at 08:48 AM permalink | Comments (4)
November 23, 2006
Forecasts Then and Now: A Cautionary Tale
The White House released its midterm forecast on Tuesday. Some thoughts on forecasts around turning points.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 10:00 AM permalink | Comments (9)
November 22, 2006
So who wants Russia's oil and gas, anyway?
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them," Lenin is said to have boasted.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 05:54 AM permalink | Comments (15)
November 21, 2006
Guest column from Shivaji Sondhi and Michael Cook
The moment seems to be opportune for some creative ideas about how to handle the situation in Iraq. Econbrowser is pleased today to publish a guest column from Princeton professors Shivaji Sondhi and Michael Cook, who direct the Project on Oil, Energy and the Middle East at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 03:20 PM permalink | Comments (22)
Some Puzzling Effects of Productivity on the Real Exchange Rate
What should be the effect of productivity increases on the real exchange rate?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:35 AM permalink | Comments (4)
November 19, 2006
Are the Democrats Truly More Protectionist?
In the wake of the midterm elections, and the failure to renew Vietnamese PNTR, there has been a lot of talk about how more protectionist Democratic lawmakers are. See WaPo, The Economist (pre-election) [sub.req.], WSJ [sub.req.] and here. Greg Mankiw also steps in the fray.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 04:53 PM permalink | Comments (22)
November 17, 2006
Housing stats look bad
Much worse numbers for housing than I was expecting were announced today by the Census Bureau.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 10:14 AM permalink | Comments (27)
Can Gravity Be Defied?
"Dark Matter", like all stories about free lunches, still excites lots of people's imagination, as evidenced by the reaction to my post on the subject a week ago. Here is one picture that should further temper the excitement.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:22 AM permalink | Comments (5)
November 15, 2006
Ain't no use to sit and wonder why, Bob
After the learned New York critics savaged my beloved Twyla Tharp/Bob Dylan musical, I was pleased to see that Right Wing Bob knows the score.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 02:16 PM permalink | Comments (4)
The Expansion Compared
There was a lot of mystification why the electorate was so concerned about the economy, when aggregate measures of economic performance were signalling positive.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 12:40 PM permalink | Comments (10)
November 14, 2006
Current Account Imbalances, Again
At the 7th annual IMF Research Conference, Olivier Blanchard discussed in the keynote lecture whether it makes sense to worry about the U.S. current acount deficit.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 07:10 AM permalink | Comments (15)
November 13, 2006
The yield curve and the term premium
Some new studies suggest that the yield curve inversion might not be quite as ominous as some of us have been assuming.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 02:22 PM permalink | Comments (17)
November 10, 2006
RIP, Dark Matter As Cure-All
Two recent publications should help put to rest the conjecture that there are vast pools of U.S. wealth lying overseas, ready to save the day.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 07:41 PM permalink | Comments (6)
November 08, 2006
Mortgage rates and new home sales
This is the third of three posts based on my new research paper titled Daily Monetary Policy Shocks and the Delayed Response of New Home Sales, in which I describe the delays between Fed policy actions and what happens in the housing market.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 05:25 AM permalink | Comments (10)
November 07, 2006
How Big Is the Housing Overhang?
There's a lot of evidence of a rising inventory of unsold housing, and a big decline in housing sales. Can a more quantitative, stock-based figure be obtained?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:01 AM permalink | Comments (7)
November 05, 2006
Using those employment numbers
What do you do when one line of the latest government statistical release says that U.S. employment grew by 92,000 jobs during October, while 4 paragraphs later the same report gives the number at 437,000?
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Posted by James Hamilton at 06:51 AM permalink | Comments (11)
November 04, 2006
The October Employment Report: Dunking the Data in Some Cold Water
There has been much hullaballoo about how tight the labor market is given the upward revisions in the August and September figures, on top of the preliminary benchmark revision reported last month.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:25 AM permalink | Comments (11)
November 02, 2006
Federal Reserve policy and mortgage rates
I've recently completed writing a research paper titled Daily Monetary Policy Shocks and the Delayed Response of New Home Sales. The paper develops some new measures of the delay between changes in Fed policy and the impact on the economy. In this, the second of three posts on the paper, I describe the paper's findings about how the Federal Reserve affects mortgage lending rates.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 06:53 PM permalink | Comments (3)
Estimating U.S.-China Trade Elasticities: Some Very Preliminary Results
Do we have any idea what the CNY appreciation against the dollar will accomplish?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:22 AM permalink | Comments (6)