Unemployment

The overarching theme here is that the economy of Europe is in tatters and this is causing a re-think of the policy course. In my view, the political space for the re-think is limited and will ultimately entail some tacked on growth…

I caught this FT graphic via David Wessel yesterday. It shows you that while the labour force in the Euro Zone as a whole generally continues to grow, the labour force in Germany has shrunk. During the euro era, Germany's labour force…

I am still on vacation here through Monday but the jobs number in the US was so ugly I had to comment briefly. The unemployment rate came in at 7.6% and 88,000 jobs were added to non-farm payrolls. The consensus estimates were for 7.7%…

By Marc Chandler The shockingly disappointing non-farm payrolls growth of 88k has sent the dollar reeling. The 61k upward revisions to the Jan and March figures and the smaller than expected trade deficit were not sufficient offsets.…

Finally, a prominent “mainstreamer” Keynesian gets MMT. Over the past couple of years, Paul Krugman has got close, but he keeps claiming that MMT believes “deficits don’t matter”. He refuses to cite any MMTer who has ever said such a silly…

The US employment situation summary for February showed an improving labor market with 236,000 jobs created and unemployment down to 7.7%. These numbers are indicative of an improving labor market and reflect the likelihood that the US will…

The US jobs data was consistent with the recent string of data clearly showing a surprising resilience to the anticipation and tightening of fiscal policy. The Canadian employment data was also stronger than expected.

Now the bad times are back, and Krugman is trying resuscitate IS-LM. I argue that he should leave it dead – not for the reasons that the new classicals killed it off (being inconsistent with neoclassical microeconomics is a plus in my…

I mentioned Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen's speech in the last post. I tend to like the way she phrases things because her statements are the clearest of all of the major FOMC policy makers. This speech is in that vein. If I could summarize…

The core of the issue is not whether the country could see one, or even two, quarters of positive performance, but whether any faltering recovery will be sustained out into the future, through 2014 and beyond. It is here that all the old…