ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES

Take a look at the May 11, 2012 Associate Press article entitled “Calls to toughen regulation follow JPMorgan loss.” [ http://news.yahoo.com/calls-toughen-regulation-jpmorgan-loss-212428437--finance.html ]  I do not expect you to completely understand the article and that is part of my point.  The banking industry has become so tremendously complex that it is difficult for people, including bankers, to understand it.  In their pursuit of profits, banks use intricate financial instruments with exorbitant risks (such as derivatives and credit default swaps) and they use savvy legal techniques to disguise those risks.  Most analysts put much of the blame for the economic decline of 2007-2009 (from which we have not yet fully recovered) on excessively risky lending practices by banks due in part to insufficient regulation of financial markets and the use of complex financial instruments that are not completely understood. Banks have spent vast sums of money lobbying poli...

Here is a joke about economists: A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly." Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four." Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says, "What do you want it to equal"? Economists (and very few others) find this joke funny because it is very revealing about how economists are used in the real world. Working for th...

“ The Greatest Generation ” is a term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the men and women who served or supported the United States during World War II. Their willingness to personally sacrifice for the greater societal good was highlighted in Brokaw’s 1998 book of that same name . Unfortunately, the baby boom generation – my generation – may not be remembered so fondly. An appropriate description for those of us born between 1946 and 1964 might be “ The Most Selfish Generation .” I say this because of the wreckless fiscal irresponsibility we have demonstrated over the past 31 years. Take a look at the red graph below. At the end of 1980, the U.S. public debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. That means from the creation of this nation through 1980, the entire net accumulated amount of money borrowed by the U.S. federal government was less that 1 trillion dollars. In 1981, about the time that baby boomers became leaders in both the public and private se...

The full chart can be seen at http://my.democrats.org/Jobs-Chart . The Obama administration feels the President's jobs record is being distorted by his Republican opponents. The Democratic Party distributed this information to try to set the record straight. The data are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the government agency that calculates and publishes the official record of labor market activity. Note that this graph is for private sector jobs. If you take a closer look at the monthly labor reports you will see that government employment has been decreasing during much of this period. In other words, if the number of federal government jobs were not decreasing, the employment situation would be even better. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the extent to which current policies have helped or hindered economic recovery. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the government agency of professional economists who advise all members of Congress about...

The latest Employment Situation news release has been posted on the BLS website at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf and also archived at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_02032012.pdf . Highlights are below. Payroll employment rises 243,000 in January; unemployment rate decreases to 8.3% 02/03/2012 Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent. Job growth was widespread, with large gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing.

The latest Employment Situation news release has been posted on the BLS website at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf and also archived at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01062012.pdf . Highlights are below. Payroll employment rises 200,000 in December; jobless rate (8.5%) continues to trend down. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 in December, and the unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent, continued to trend down. Job gains occurred in transportation and warehousing, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and mining.

Advocates of U.S. Presidential candidate Ron Paul, seem befuddled that his economic proposals do not receive more support and consideration. I am unsure if their criticisms of the U.S. Federal Reserve System (the Fed) are objections to the existence of paper money, central banks, or to the specific operation of the Fed. Monetary policy for an increasingly interconnected world is complex. It is reasonable that most people do not understand it. But it can be understood. Let me try to address a few issues. Money is anything that is generally accepted to serve as a medium of exchange (i.e., you can buy things with it), a store of value (i.e., you use it to save purchasing power for use at a later time), and a unit of account (i.e., it is used to measure relative prices). Stated more simply, money facilitates commerce. Without money that is widely accepted, easy to carry and exchange, and difficult to counterfeit, economic transactions become much more difficult. Without money, peopl...