GDP Revised Up: Crosses Zero! Woo-Hoo!
And the point about that is this: we tend to obsess about whether the economy is growing (good) or shrinking (bad). But clearly, contracting at 0.1% last quarter, as in the initial GDP report, is hardly different than growing at 0.1%, as in today’s revision. Crossing zero is a lot less important than growing fast [...]
Austerity That Would Make a European Policymaker Proud
It’s not just the sequester. It’s that those cuts are coming on top of a bunch of other fiscal and economic headwinds. The two figures below come from Mark Zandi and Moody’s.com. The first shows the quarterly impact to real GDP of the cuts from the sequester, whkch amount to about -0.5% this year, assuming [...]
Talking Top Salaries in Finance and the Gas Price Spike with Kudlow and Co.
Had great fun co-hosting the Larry Kudlow show last night—yes, it was fun and interesting (though way, way too much of the Republican talking point: it’s Obama’s sequester! That part was pure nonsense). Anyway, check out this segment on the pay of finance CEO’s. There you learn that as penance for his lack of oversight [...]
Wonkblog on the Great Yellen Speech
Just wanted to point you towards a characteristically excellent Wonkblog treatment of the Yellen speech I was all worked up about last week. Here’s my challenge for Ezra K and the others over there. Your wonkery is unsurpassed and clearly you get the importance of what Yellen is yellin’ about. Me too. Paul K too. [...]
Central Banks: Why Are They Alone Fighting for Growth?
Might as well end the week where I started: talking—OK, complaining—about misguided fiscal austerity. And wondering, once again, why it’s only unelected central bankers, not politicians with jobless and wageless constituents, who are trying to do something about growth and unemployment (see figure below on the magnitudes of the liquidity they’re pumping into their economies). [...]
Slowing Health Costs, Budgets, and Jobs
There’s been a spate of interesting pieces over the past week on the deceleration in health care spending over the past few years (see here and here, e.g.). The figure below, from GS Researchers, provide a useful, albeit cluttered, look at the evolution of the issue. It shows CBO’s evolving 10-year projections of health spending as [...]
SOTU, The Morning After
There’s a plethora of analysis, criticism, praise, and commentary in this AMs papers on the big speech last night, to which I have only a little to add. As usual, start with Wonkbook but as far as I could absorb, the general consensus is that the President laid out an ambitious, progressive agenda that will [...]
Talking Growth on Squawk
Had great fun guest-hosting on CNBC’s Squawk Box this AM. In one segment, we all whipped around talking about what it would take to move from 2% growth to 4% growth (and we may not even be at 2% right now; probably more like 1.5%). As expected, there were quite divergent views and as even [...]
Growth and Debt Reduction
Some readers thought I buried the lead in this post on recent debates around debt stabilization. In this conclusion to that piece, I wrote: …economic growth is really the most overlooked variable here. At least in my lifetime, the only time I’ve ever seen the debt ratio fall in earnest was when the economy was [...]
SOTU: Watch Away from the Ball
When watching a basketball game, though your eye is drawn toward the player with the ball, it’s good to watch how the play’s developing away from the ball—trying to see how players without the ball are moving–looking not just where the play is, but where it will be a few passes ahead. That’s also the [...]
Is It Really Important to Stabilize the Public Debt? And, If So, When and At What Level?
Suppose, just for entertainment purposes, that we wanted to have a sane, rational, and even informative discussion about what to do about our public deficits and debt (the latter being the cumulative sum of the former)—one that asks the questions posed in the title but doesn’t automatically default to the “hair-on-fire, we’re Greece!, hard choices, [...]
Leverage/Deleverage: The Timing’s Off…
For a while, you couldn’t read an economics’ blog without running into a figure like the one below on the leveraging and deleveraging dynamics of the federal government and household sectors. Each line shows the change in debt (household or gov’t) to GDP, smoothed over four quarters. In defense of the budget deficits that built [...]
Who Gets Hurt Most by Higher Unemployment?
The recent CBO report projects real GDP growth to be a measly 1.4% this year, down from a rate closer to 3%, they claim, were it not for all the fiscal cuts baked in the 2013 cake: CBO estimates that economic growth in 2013 would be roughly 1½ percentage points faster than the agency now projects [...]
Could Congress Take the Hippocratic Oath on the Economy?
If you wanted to be (overly) generous in your interpretation of the CBO data out yesterday, you might say that we’re sacrificing the near term for the longer term. That is, we’re accepting lower economic growth rates and higher unemployment now in exchange for lower-budget deficits which will, according to CBO, be better for growth [...]
Talkin’ Revenues and Loopholes
My CBPP colleague Chuck Marr has a nice little post up on where some of the revenues might come from in this next round of fiscal negotiations. …policymakers could reform or eliminate many costly tax breaks as part of a balanced long-term deficit-reduction package — or as part of a balanced short-term package to pay [...]
Testify!
Gave testimony today, just like Nicely, Nicely, though not quite as exciting. Here’s the material I presented, which I think many in these parts will like, but here’s the summary: Testifying today at a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on “Challenges and Opportunities Facing America’s Schools and Workplaces,” CBPP Senior Fellow Jared Bernstein explained that recent [...]
CBO’s New Budget/Economic Outlook
CBO’s out with a new budget and economic analysis today, and as you can imagine we’re all just on shpilkes going through and picking out nuggets. (A colleague just sent an e-mail that CBO director Doug Elmendorf is on TV right now! That’s Beyonce-at-Super-Bowl for us folks.) In order to make a lot more sense [...]
Suppose the Fed Wanted to Create More Inflation…Could They?
I’ve been meaning to comment on this interesting piece from yesterday’s NYT on how some would like to see the Federal Reserve do more than they’re already doing to stimulate growth. Specifically, the argument goes, they should be trying harder to raise the rate of inflation, which has lately been below their 2% target. [...]
Jobs Day Round Up
Played chin music all day on the jobs report and stumbled on a number of good and no-so-good points made by various peeps throughout the day. –With the revisions to last year’s payroll numbers, job growth in the last few months of 2012 was pretty strong, at least by recent standards—about 200k in Nov and [...]
On the Negative GDP Report
Jeez, I knew we were growing too slowly but I didn’t think we were contracting. And I still don’t—not in any way that’s likely to stick through revisions and incoming data. Today’s GDP report for the last quarter of 2012 had the economy contracting at an annual rate of 0.1%, which implies a quarterly rate [...]
Live in OR!
Headed out to Oregon to give talks in Eugene on Monday and Portland on Tuesday. Info here in case you’re out there. And thanks in advance to the great Oregon Center for Public Policy for planning a major Northwestern wonkout. I’m planning to talk about inequality, growth, jobs, and incomes–what’s broke and how to fix [...]
Unions in America: 2012 Data
Even as the labor market expanded in 2012, union membership fell again, both in the private and public sectors, according to data released this morning by the BLS. –Among all workers, 11.3%, or 14.4 million were union members in 2012, compared to 11.8% (14.8 million) in 2011. –The share of union members in the public [...]
Does Inequality Stifle or Promote Growth?
Today’s NYT features two different views on the impact of inequality on growth. In a magazine piece I wrote about earlier in the week, Adam Davidson frames the question in the traditional way: a modern economy can have faster growth or less inequality, but it can’t have both. We need to decide, he asserts: “What [...]
An Inequality Debate Heats Up
There’s an interesting debate going on right now as to factors behind the rise in the inequality of earnings that’s been a fixture of our job market for decades (with interesting and germane variations, as you’ll see). At the center of the debate is whether technological change is the main factor driving inequality or is [...]
Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.
