Category Archives: economics

Scott Borgerson, in Foreign Affairs: Taking into account canal fees, fuel costs, and other variables that determine freight rates, these shortcuts [through the Arctic Ocean] could cut the cost of a single voyage by a large container ship by as … Continue reading →

I’m not a big fan of the monthly payrolls report, which has a 90% confidence interval "on the order of plus or minus 430,000". Payrolls fell by 63,000 in February – something which I’m sure is going to be treated … Continue reading →

Joel Millman’s front-pager on sawdust in the WSJ is everything a WSJ A-hed should be. As the construction industry slows down, there’s much less sawdust to go round, and that’s having devastating consequences in all manner of unlikely places: The … Continue reading →

How irrational is our love of Free Stuff? Dan Ariely runs a thought experiment: Consider how long you would be willing to stand in line for a free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone. Let’s assume that your answer is … Continue reading →

Mike Moffatt is trying to lose weight, and has part of his weight-loss plan he’s going to give me $100 if he doesn’t lose at least one percentage point in body fat in March. Which is nice for me: all … Continue reading →

Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen are talking today about the optics of wealth, concentrating on Cuba. Why would people think that Cuba is doing better than northern Mexico, when the opposite is true? And more broadly, why do rich countries … Continue reading →

Bob Davis has an excellent front-pager in today’s WSJ on the dance between sovereign investors and sovereign investees. Both the US and the EU are looking for sovereign wealth funds to become more transparent, although it’s far from obvious what … Continue reading →

French bank CLSA is putting on "a five-day gala gabfest" in Tokyo this week, according to Gwen Robinson. Along with expensive musical entertainment there’s more highbrow stuff as well: Among the 30-plus speakers being wheeled out for the assembled multitudes … Continue reading →

Paul Kedrosky said this morning that he was thinking about "the anti-wisdom of crowds". I wasn’t sure what he meant, until this afternoon: The sort of things people want government to do to help the U.S. economy — cut imports! … Continue reading →

David Leonhardt today applauds Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT for "making economics relevant again". His column is the result of his second annual survey of economists; the first came up with a list … Continue reading →

Nouriel Roubini: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and… Larry Summers: Oh, I see. And most blogs go up to ten? Nouriel Roubini: Exactly. Larry Summers: Does that mean it’s grimmer? Is … Continue reading →

I wasn’t too surprised to learn that Ben Bernanke is an optimist. But Peter Orszag too? The director of the CBO always seems pretty downbeat to me. Yet today, releasing an updated economic forecast, he says that "CBO’s projections do … Continue reading →

On a scale from one to ten, how good of a driver are you? About 8, you say? Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone to rate their proficiency, on a scale of 1-10, in something that they … Continue reading →

In every major market, the business media generally live and work in the city which acts the country’s financial capital. As a result, it’s easy to misinterpret choppiness in financial markets as real weakness in the broader economy. I’m not … Continue reading →

I should mention that although systemic breakdowns are rare these days, they’re not impossible, and I’m thankful to Nouriel Roubini for explaining over the course of 3,461 words today just how a global financial meltdown might happen. If you’re in … Continue reading →

Rick Bookstaber has stopped blogging, so does Jim Surowiecki feek a need to fill the gap? Here he is channelling Bookstaber in the pages of the New Yorker: The situation illustrates a fundamental paradox of today’s financial system: it’s bigger … Continue reading →

Anonymous econoblogger knzn has done a great job of moving the inflation-expectations story forwards with a blog entry actually looking at where Greg Ip’s numbers might be coming from. The reason for looking at inflation expectations between 2013 and 2018 … Continue reading →

Greg Ip passes along this chart of long-term inflation expectations, which are now hitting new highs. The chart shows something called the "5yr-5yr forward breakeven" – what the market expects inflation to average over the five years from 2013 to … Continue reading →