There is much excited talk in the press these days about the rise in ten-year yields to 1.5 percent and the rise to 2 percent for the breakeven inflation rates expressed when we comparing Treasury nominal and TIPS yields. The bond vigilantes are back! Another Great Inflation around the corner!
Author: Jonathan Wright
Inside Baseball
Seasonal adjustment is one of the more obscure potential casualties of the pandemic recession. A well known problem with seasonal adjustment is that an outlier observation will lead the seasonal adjustment process to shift its belief about what is normal for that month. In cases like the coronavirus recession, this is undesirable because the unusual […]
538 survey of macroeconomists
The 538 webpage, part of ABC news and originally set up by Nate Silver, has just done a survey of academic macroeconomic forecasters about the coronavirus recession. Allan Timmermann at UC San Diego and I helped them with this and the results were released this afternoon. The results point to a deep recession with a […]
Budget Projections, Interest Rate Assumptions, and Preposterous Assertions
Since early 2014, we’ve been lamenting the fact that CBO has persisted in telling the same Armageddon budget story as it was telling 2009-2012, despite the fact that the deficit picture had dramatically improved. We mused aloud that if real debt problems did reappear, they might regret having spent several years crying wolf. If we […]
2014: The Year of the Hawk
Fed Chairman Bernanke commented on the monetary policy outlook at a speech at the NBER a couple of weeks ago, and then again in Congressional Testimony. He gave a clear signal that the current voting members of the FOMC plan to maintain a highly accommodative overall stance of monetary policy for some time. These remarks […]