Category Archives: Teaching macroeconomics

The Federal Reserve awarded $334.714 billion 213 billion pounds of eight-day term deposits to banks, a record amount, at a test auction held on Monday, it said in a statement on Tuesday.  The U.S. central bank allotted them to 90 … Continue reading →

Will David Carr tell his readers how much money he made for his puff piece on Bill Cosby, and give that to a good charity? I was one of those who looked away. Having read the Philadelphia magazine story when … Continue reading →

What do I mean by saying that everything changes [at the so-called zero lower bound]? As I wrote way back when, in a rock-bottom economy “the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky … Continue reading →

Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank president, strongly signaled on Friday that he and his colleagues were preparing a new round of powerful monetary stimulus to jolt the flagging eurozone economy at a time when the risk of deflation is … Continue reading →

A report released this week by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that banks had built up enormous holdings of commodities and infrastructure that allowed the banks to monitor and influence the price of these materials.One potential danger for … Continue reading →

China’s central bank on Friday announced a surprise cut to interest rates, in the clearest sign yet that policy makers are growing increasingly concerned the country’s economic slowdown.Despite numerous signs that growth has been flagging, China’s leadership for months has … Continue reading →

The former chief executive of Landsbanki of Iceland was sentenced to prison on Wednesday, the third of the top executives of the country’s three largest banks that the government has successfully prosecuted and jailed for misconduct during the financial crisis.  … Continue reading →

Fed officials have described the statement as indicating that the central bank is most likely to begin raising short-term rates in mid-2015. The account of the October meeting, released after a standard three-week delay, said a couple of officials wanted … Continue reading →

Basically, if population is getting older, and new investments (software) do not generate much employment and hence multiplier effects (and indeed induce people to work less, because what is better than checking your Facebook page all day long?) then GDP … Continue reading →

As you may have guessed, this is not some special problem that only Japan has. The whole world is in the middle of that same demographic transition, in more or less dramatic forms. Productivity in the richest countries is growing … Continue reading →

Here’s another study that reflects poorly on mobile devices — cell phones this time — in the classroom. Duncan, Hoekstra, and Wilcox 2012 investigated cell phone use by students in five introductory science courses through in-class observations, student surveys, and … Continue reading →

The preliminary economic report, issued by the Cabinet Office, showed that gross domestic product fell at an annualized pace of 1.6 percent in the quarter through September.That added to the previous quarter’s much larger decline, which the government now puts … Continue reading →

The drop in prices, however, has been good for the United States, which is growing faster than other industrialized economies. Lower oil prices in particular will provide a much needed stimulus to consumers, particularly lower-income Americans who spend a larger … Continue reading →

Transcripts released by the Federal Reserve on Friday [Feb 22 2014] indicated that the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee didn’t discuss a direct bailout of Bear Stearns just days before it provided the struggling investment bank with a $12.9 … Continue reading →

The era of quantitative easing is almost over, for now, and in the United States, at least. But the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s policy to pump trillions of dollars into the financial system in hopes of stimulating the economy … Continue reading →

For my Macroeconomics class I assigned Alan Blinder’s After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead.  I’ll be reviewing the book chapter by chapter in the coming weeks. The very first paragraph of the first … Continue reading →

Many of the most bullish forecasts of China’s economic future are based, more or less, on extrapolation. For more than three decades, its economic output per person has been rising at an extraordinary annual rate of 6 to 10 percent, … Continue reading →

We are in October 2014, and unemployment already down to 5.9%, a full percentage point below the March 2013 projections. According to the most recent projections available at the time of this response (March 2013) most FOMC meeting attendees do … Continue reading →

For the last five years of economic expansion, Congress has been unwilling to use fiscal policy to try to encourage faster growth. That has left the Fed as the only game in town, and the Bernanke Fed again and again … Continue reading →

There are two problems when I read the very nice summary:  (1) If the stock market rises 3% this week, does that mean his analysis of last week is wrong?  Always a bad idea to theorize about the longer term … Continue reading →