NEW PAPER THREAD: Our paper on fiscal multipliers has just been released by @PIIE. We create a dataset of large fiscal expansions for 17 #OECD countries between 1960 and 2007 piie.com/publications/w… 1/8 2/10 The database is constructed by first finding when a country's cyclically adjusted deficit increased by a lot and then by reading OECD and IMF reports published in those years to check whether a fiscal stimulus did in fact happen at that time and why

THREAD: @EU_Commission could open Excessive Deficit Procedure against #Italy within the next few weeks. This is much earlier than generally understood. As @AlvaroISLM and I explain in this @piie blogpost piie.com/blogs/realtime… a sanction could be imposed at the same time 2/ Until this 10/18 letter ec.europa.eu/info/sites/inf… from @EU_Commission, it was generally understood that an EDP in the corrective arm of the Stability and Growth Pact (or a Significant Deviation Procedure in its preventive arm) could only be opened in 2019

This morning @BLS_gov published #CPI for June. Of particular interest is the data on washing machines as @realDonaldTrump introduced a 20% tariff on them in Jan. Since then, I find that their price is 16% higher than would otherwise have been expected without the tariff. @PIIE The biggest month to month price increases were in April (+9.6%), May (+7.4%), and January (+3.4%). The price increase for June is +1.8%.