Over at the WaPo. And I got more words to fool around with than usual! I tried, you’ll let me know how successfully, to bring some nuance to the argument, as the point is decidedly not “look, we’ve done all this great policy and the US recovery is stellar!” It’s that contrary to what I… Read more
Archive for the ‘Recession/Stimulus’ Category
Why is our macroeconomy doing so much better than Europe’s?
Over at PostEverything. Bonus for OTE’ers: here’s an update of a figure I made awhile ago tracking Eurozone GDP, government spending (both in real terms), and unemployment. What I find revealing here is the fairly clear–for this sort of thing–initial increase in public spending to offset the downturn and the subsequent stabilization of GDP and… Read more
I brought the deficit way down and all I got was…
…crappy poll numbers. Over at PostEverything. Really, this is just genuinely upsetting. It’s one thing to run the numbers but quite another to think about all the unnecessary pain this has caused. You just can never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas.
Wherein Both Delong and Fernald Confuse Me
Not hard to do–and nothing against either of those big brains–but I’m confuzzled by this post from Brad. The question–or at least one of the questions–is a) whether there’s hysteresis in play and b) whether reverse hysteresis can be invoked to repair some of the damage. I’m too rushed to go into explanations of terms… Read more
Cyclical vs. Structural: Bivens and Shierholz Turn Over Every Stone to Find Out
As central bankers gather for their annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a top agenda item is evaluating the current and future amount of slack in the US economy. In this regard, they’d be well advised to check out this new study from the two economists at the Economic Policy Institute which provides an exhaustive… Read more