Unemployment

There is no question that labor force participation in the US has been falling as more people drop out of the workforce. But that measure could be misleading because as the population ages, the workforce will shrink naturally. Perhaps a…

The latest flow of funds data from the US Federal Reserve show that the great American household deleveraging may be over. This should add a credit accelerator to the US economy which maintains growth. Meanwhile analysts are increasingly…

Those inclined to the Fed tapering in December seem myopic. The employment was not the only economic report that was released before the weekend. The US also reported that the Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the deflator for core…

In the case of Greece, with fuel, food, and medicine making up a large share of the import bill, further economic disruption and destabilization would likely result from a choice to exit the eurozone. Exiting the euro does not appear to be…

Today is the day when the much anticipated jobs report was released. And the data were good. The jobs report was not the big news in my view, however, because at the same time we saw the jobs numbers we also got personal income numbers -…

The US November jobs data are generally stronger than expected. The closure of the government and the re-opening suggests a two month average offers a more accurate read, which as we noted, is fairly steady job growth in the US. There are…

My view since the beginning of the financial crisis has been that policy levers to alleviate this private debt stress are limited, and that this limitation will be felt in defaults, writedowns and deleveraging of a magnitude that is larger…

After having been considered to head both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Israel earlier this year, Lawrence Summers has been propelled back into the center of the broader economic dialogue with a speech at a recent IMF Economic Forum.…

In September I wrote that I expected the Fed to establish a lower bound for inflation threshold as one of its next moves. The rationale was two-fold. First, inflation is undershooting and the Fed needs policy space to deal with unwanted…

Recently, I wrote a series of posts predicting that the Fed would give up on QE and move toward forward guidance in order to be able to normalize policy. Nevertheless, I have also been saying for quite some time I believe the US zero rate…