The Eurozone is a confederation of 16 European countries. When joining, countries abandon control of their currency to the European Central Bank, and they agree to significant constraints on their monetary policy. Why would they do this? Countries join hoping to benefit from increased trade efficiency and access to markets. Are the benefits of joining… Read more

Many economists declared the recession over after the third-quarter GDP release. We at CERF disagreed and pointed out that almost every long recession has had at least one quarter of positive growth during the recession. We also pointed out that many of the reasons for the relatively strong third quarter were temporary. We just didn’t… Read more

One last comment on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) employment and unemployment data release on Friday, I promise. I haven’t seen any comments on the “Long Term Unemployed.” These are people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. According to the release, there were just under 5 million people (4,934,000) who had… Read more

The markets are reacting enthusiastically to today’s jobs and unemployment data. I’m not sure why. Dan discussed the jobs data and the problems with seasonal adjustment in the previous post. There is also a problem in the unemployment data.