J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2212

Market Clearing...

I have cleared the waitlist--if, that is, people would go ahead and choose sections with open seats:

ECON 1 001 SEPTEMBER 3, 2010: ENROLLED: 627. WAITLIST: 26. CAPACITY: 660

I confess I did not expect this to happen, certainly not this early in the term...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Liveblogs World War II: September 3, 1940

FDR to Congress:

Message of President Roosevelt to the Congress, September 3, 1940: I transmit herewith for the information of the Congress notes exchanged between the British Ambassador at Washington and the Secretary of State on September 2, 1940, under which this Government has acquired the right to lease naval and air bases in Newfoundland, and in the islands of Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Antigua, and in British Guiana; also a copy of an opinion of the...

Jobless Recovery Watch

Q: How long do jobless recoveries in the post-WWII U.S. typically last?

A: We have only had two. One lasted two and a half years. The other lasted four years. This one has, so far, lasted ten months.

Yes, Judge Jay Bybee Should Be Impeached and Removed from Office. Reason CXXVI

Scott Horton:

When Is Offering a Drink of Water a Crime?: Last August, I reported on the case of Walt Stanton, a graduate student at Claremont Theology School who, with a group called “No More Deaths,” deposited bottles of water at points in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, an 18,000-acre area on the Arizona-Mexico border. Stanton and his group have no particular position on the illegal immigration issue—they just think that the immigrants shouldn’t die from dehydration. The...

Finally! Somebody Else Worth Reading on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Peter Orszag

This isn't getting worse more slowly. This is getting better::

New York Times Company : Investors : Press Release: NEW YORK, Sep 03, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Peter Orszag, economist and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, will become a contributing columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page. Beginning Tuesday, Sept. 7, his columns will appear one to two times a month in The Times and online at NYTimes.com/opinion and will cover a broad range of economic and...

Files for September 8 Econ 1 Lecture: Downturns and Financial Markets: Keynesians and Monetarists (J. Bradford DeLong, U.C. Berkeley, Fall 2010)

September 8: Downturns and Financial Markets: Keynesians and Monetarists:

Audio

Slides

Notes





Open publication - Free publishing



Open publication - Free publishing

I Don't Think This Is the Best Way to Put It...

Paul Krugman writes:

Paradoxes Of Deleveraging And Releveraging: Whenever the issue of fiscal stimulus comes up, you can count on someone chiming in to say, “Only a moron could believe that the answer to a problem created by too much debt is to create even more debt.” It sounds plausible — but it misses the key point: there’s a fallacy of composition here...

There is nothing wrong with what Paul says. But I think it is incomplete, and that there is a better way of getting to the...

Yes, Fiscal Stimulus Can Pull Spending Forward from the Future into the Present When It Is Most Needed

Atif Mian and Amir Sufi:

The Effects of Fiscal Stimulus: Evidence from the 2009 ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Program: A key rationale for fiscal stimulus is to boost consumption when aggregate demand is perceived to be inefficiently low. We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program on short and medium run auto purchases. Our empirical strategy exploits variation across U.S. cities in ex-ante exposure to the...

Jobless Recovery Watch: "Getting Worse Slowly" Does Not Mean "Is Better"...

Ryan Avent raises a cheer for the labor market:

Labour markets: In fact, the figures aren't that bad. The headline number is negative—off 54,000 for the month—but that's overwhelmingly due to the continued drawdown in temporary census employment, which subtracted 114,000 jobs from the August report. Ex-census, the economy added 60,000 jobs in August. Private employment rose by 67,000 for the month. Since December of 2009, private employment has grown by a total of 763,000...

We would...

Two-Handed Stimulus

The policy of coordinated monetary quantitative easing combined with more government deficit spending was what Milton Friedman's teacher Jacob Viner called for during the Great Depression, as Friedman approvingly recounted in *Milton Friedman's Monetary Framework."

Greg Ip reports from Jackson Hole:

Monetary and fiscal stimulus make a potent, if uneasy, combination: THE Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the big event of the year for...