Wondering whether David will get the kind of hate mail I've been receiving over my Kentucky piece 1/ nytimes.com/2021/12/17/bri…
The odd thing was that I didn't say anything negative about the people of Kentucky (as opposed to their politicians), or assert in any way that they were responsible for their state's problems. I just pointed out the arithmetic 2/ nytimes.com/2021/12/14/opi…
All I said was that KY should acknowledge that it benefits from a transfer union in which richer states subsidize poorer — as they should! Btw, I did a scatterplot on this a couple of years back 3/
But there's a wild double standard in US regional discourse: it's apparently OK to rag on about the decadence of cities, but to even mention the math of federal transfers to rural areas is an un-American attack on heartland values 4/
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My long take on inflation. Timing was fortuitously good — right after the Fed's sort-of pivot, which I was able to incorporate 1/ nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opi…
I say sort-of pivot because while the Fed has stopped saying "transitory", it still seems to believe that much of the inflation we're currently experiencing will fade away without the need to impose a lot of economic pain 2/
One odd thing about this debate is that the actual policy demands of the inflation hawks have been pretty moderate: an end to bond purchases (which I've always supported) and a baseline of fairly modest rate hikes. And that's what the Fed just delivered 3/
Three rules for interpreting the CPI print coming in 10 minutes:
1. Don't make too much of one month's number 2. Don't make too much of one month's number 3. Don't make too much of one month's number
By the way, the same rules apply if it comes in lower than expected 1/
Also, of course, this report won't include the effects of the recent drop in oil prices 2/
The big questions won't be resolved today, although we're looking for clues. How much of what's happening is the bullwhip effect, i.e., shortages made worse by panic buying? 3/ bis.org/speeches/sp211…
Willing to consider this. But I can't find any combination of numbers under which real wages are down enough to justify the extreme gloom consumers are reporting 1/
Still thinking about why Americans are so downbeat about the economy, inspired in part by this Simon Wren-Lewis piece about Britain — where voters say that the Tories are better for the economy, but Labour better for living standards (!) 1/ mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2021/12/they-l…
This seems to jibe with my suggestion that what people mean when they are asked about "the economy" doesn't connect very well to personal experience 2/ nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opi…
We are, after all, experiencing a rapid improvement in employment — actually an awesomely fast recovery in prime-age employment 3/
So Republicans plan to run against inflation, while having zero ideas about how to bring it down 1/ nbcnews.com/politics/polit…
Noticeable that they're still blaming unemployment benefits for reducing labor supply — when this happens to be an experiment we've done, which failed 2/