By Floyd Norris The aging of America continues, and it seems likely that this year there will be more people over 60 than people under 20 in this country, the first time that has ever happened. As recently as 1980, there were twice as many people under 20 – most of whom were yet to […]
Bridge the Gaps
The Center for Financial Economics advances knowledge of the economic forces driving the financial system through research and teaching. Our work explores the fundamental economics of our current system and the dynamic tensions that will spur change.
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Numbers Don’t Lie?
By Floyd Norris The labor market is booming. The average unemployment rate in 2023 was 3.64%, down a smidgen from the previous year and the lowest for any total year since 1969. But is that just because fewer people are looking for work, and therefore are not counted as unemployed? A way to seek that […]
Why Don’t Americans Believe Inflation Is Coming Down? Because (Most) Prices Aren’t
To an economist looking at the government CPI report that came out Tuesday, it is clear that inflation is receding. Over the past 12 months, the overall CPI is up 3.2%, far below the peak annual rate of 9.1% seen in the summer of 2022. The co-called “core” rate, which excludes volatile food and energy […]
Financial-Stability QE Can Appreciate the Exchange Rate
By Alessandro Rebucci and Sinem Yagmur Toraman Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, CEPR and NBER Johns Hopkins University, Economics Department On Wednesday September 28, 2022 the Bank of England announced a short-term Gilt purchase program to bail out the UK pension system. The 30-year yield tanked, UK pension funds were rescued, and, quite surprisingly, the […]
A Job Boom That Left Many Out
Job growth in the United States was distinctly uneven for decades before the Pandemic hit, a fact that was emphasized this week when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a list of when each county in the United States reached its highest employment, based on data from 1975 to 2020. It showed that only 27% […]
Steeling Ourselves for Less Steel Use in China
Herbert Stein, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors for R.M. Nixon, reminded his colleagues that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop”. History is littered with speculators who went broke, betting against clearly unsustainable trends but forgetting that forever is a long time. Which brings us to the Chinese Real […]