Dan, my favorite workaholic, sent the following from China and asked that I post it: Dan Hamilton October 28, 2010 The first estimate of United States third quarter Gross Domestic Product came out today. The preliminary estimate of third quarter real GDP growth was 2.0 percent, which follows a 1.7 percent growth rate during the… Read more

I’ll be giving a talk at the Valley Industry and Commerce Association (VICA) Business Forecast Conference on October 28 at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills California.  James Paulsen of Wells Capital Management and William Roberts of my undergraduate Alma Mater, California State University Northridge, will also be there. The three of us were… Read more

United States non-farm jobs fell by 95,000 jobs in September driven by a 159,000 loss of government jobs that was offset by a 64,000 gain in private sector payroll jobs. The government job losses resulted from Census cutbacks and continued local government sector declines. Non-farm job growth has been negative for four months now, i.e.… Read more

Molly Clancy & Dan Hamilton In July we discussed the topic of Multiple-Equilibria in the United States economy. This blog is an update to that post, which can be found here. We argued there that the United States is currently in a “good-deflation” equilibrium, where consumers and producers find low price growth as helpful in… Read more

The Los Angeles Times has an article today with the scare headline “$69 million in California welfare money drawn out of state.” This is the most recent of several of these types of articles, not necessarily in the Times, the purpose of which seems to be publicizing the claim that welfare recipiensts are wasting the… Read more

Modern economic theory has come to think of important macro-economic events as caused by shocks. The types of shocks are usually organized into four broad categories: supply shocks, demand shocks, policy shocks, and bubbles/debt shocks. United States examples of very large shocks include the recession of 1974, (a supply shock), the Great Depression, the 1981… Read more