Comments on: Did the stimulus work?

By: mesaeconoguy

mesaeconoguy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:02:00 +0000

Yeah, no shit, eh? If the stimulus was working, we wouldn’t have 9.8% (going to 10+ shortly) unemployment now, would we?Please stop talking until you have remedied your acute cranial-rectal insertion problem.

Muchas gracias.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:16:00 +0000

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:42:00 +0000

You don’t have to read past the subtitle to not take this guy seriously.

What the hell does he think “jobs created or saved” is if not net employment change. The point is it’s a net change from the counterfactual. Net change from last quarter isn’t entirely uninteresting, but it’s meaningless in interpreting the impact of a policy. Any economist could tell you that.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Not especially expansionary for two reasons:

1. The recently inaugurated policy of paying interest on reserves changes the relationship between increased reserve levels and the money supply. In other words, what you’re seeing is a huge increase in M1, but the rate at which it gets out into the economy increased dramatically since I think it was last October when they started paying interest. People are still looking at M1 stats with a pre-2008 mindset. Other central banks have always done this.

2. People disagree on the correct inflation targeting rules, but none of the rules floating around out there say that what the Fed is doing now is particularly expansionary, because the output gap is so high and inflation is so low.

I should ask you – why do you think increasing reserves and low rates necessarily make for an expansionary policy? The economy is not a static thing. What may have been an expansionary rate or reserve level in 2005 may not be expansionary today.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:04:00 +0000

Ed Lazear? An economist?

Here he is May of 2 thousand and fricking 8 still prediciting no recession.

WSJ
MAY 8, 2008, 6:15 A.M. ET Lazear Sees No Recession for U.S. Economy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121019473822674751.html