Ray Hendon’s Economics Blog

Now is the time

This article is by Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, and currently professor of economics at the University of California, Berkley.
Oct 5, 2009
In his Saturday radio address, President Obama acknowledged the White House is exploring “additional options to promote job creation.” It’s about time. This is the worst job market in [...]

The labor department estimates that July layoffs were the least since August of last year.  The chart below, provided by the New York Times, provides a clear picture of how the economy is slowly pulling itself out of the worst recession in over fifty years.

Certainly the rate of fall in the number of layoffs [...]

One of the casualties of the world financial crash of 2008 was the carry trade. For the investor to make money on the interest rate differential between two currencies, it is imperative that the currency prices remain stable. Many of the emerging market currencies fell almost 50% from the last quarter of last year. This [...]

We now have confirmation that the U.S. is beginning a recession.  Reuters reports: >
The economy shrank at a 0.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter, its sharpest contraction in seven years as consumers cut spending and businesses reduced investment in the face of rising fears that recession was setting in.
The Commerce Department said the [...]

Looks like we’re in for another round of fiscal stimulus. (Does stimulus come in rounds? Just asking…) Anyway, Menzie Chinn at the venerable Econobrowser blog revisits Mark Z.’s Congressional testimony from last summer, wherein he rated the relative oomph of various legislative stimuli. (Also available in this Dismal Scientist article .)

Chinn avers:
Onebig caveat to the [...]

From the NY Times: <Currency market traders were keeping nervous watch for central bank intervention, after Group of 7 finance and monetary officials expressed concern about the recent excessive volatility in the yen’s exchange rates.
“We are concerned about the recent excessive volatility in the exchange rate of the yen and its possible adverse implications [...]

If you think that the American equities markets have been hit hard lately, take a look at some of the emerging markets. The graph below charts the last six months of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the iShares ETF, EEM, which tracks emerging markets around the world, and EWY, the South Korean ETF from iShares. [...]

Housing Market
The number of homeowners ensnared in the foreclosure crisis grew by more than 70 percent in the third quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to data released Thursday. Nationwide, nearly 766,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice from July through September, up 71 percent from [...]

Back and Forth on Housing Starts
Economic hard times inspire two contradictory responses. One is to simply to want it to stop hurting. The other is to want the system purged and cleansed, at whatever up-front cost. The two are not mutually exclusive; indeed it’s quite common to wish for each in turn, or even simoultaneously. [...]