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Module 4 Extra Credit Posts for Fall 2025

November 3rd Update for 11/12:  News reports are that the House will vote on re-opening the federal government around 7 pm eastern time. It is expected to pass, and Trump has indicated he will sign it. Note that this continues the problematic payments to health insurers through the end of January. That gives them about 11 weeks to sort out their differences. Update for 11/11:  The Senate voted 60-40 to end the shutdown late on Monday evening. The bill they voted on now goes to the House. Many of the Representatives are still out of town (being around your district at election time to make appearances with candidates for other offices), but they are expected to vote by the end of the week. No guarantee it will pass, but that vote only needs to be a majority rather than a supermajority. As explained in other parts below, they can fund some or all of the government. They funded parts of the government through the end of the fiscal year, and the rest of it through January 30th. Ye...
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Module 3 Extra Credit Posts for Fall 2025

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October 27 I was hugely amused by this editorial entitled " Getting Used to 3% Inflation " from  The Wall Street Journal . I didn't see it until this weekend (and it may have actually been published before class on Friday). But it says essentially the same things that I did about Friday's inflation numbers.   Is “three” the new “two?” ...  No one in Washington seems bothered that this remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target. ... The White House press office hailed this as an anti-inflation triumph. There’s always some excuse or explanation that politicians and Wall Street offer to say this is no big deal. ...  But at some point you have to admit all these add up to a persistent inflation problem. ...  ... It’s obvious now that Chairman   Jerome Powell ’s declaration of mission-accomplished in September 2024 was premature when he began the Fed’s interest-rate cuts this cycle. ...  ... Yet the Fed seems poised for another 25-bas...
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Module 2 Extra Credit Posts for Fall 2025

October 8 There is no news about inflation, but it's worthwhile to start showing you some numbers early in the semester. First, there are two things to differentiate: a price index and an inflation rate. There are lots of price indexes. An inflation rate is the rate of change of a particular price index. We can get information on a price index like the CPI by using the keywords "FRED CPI". We can get information on the inflation rate (according to the CPI) with the keywords "FRED CPI inflation". October 6 The discussion on the 3rd got cut off by a student announcement. We're going to navigate to the same page, but continue down the drop-down list a bit. We continued with the page entitled "Civilian Unemployment Rate" that we got from Google using the keywords below. This time we played around with graphs showing you what the characteristics of the unemployed actually are. So, you use the drop down menu to select "Reasons for Unemployment"...
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Module 1 Extra Credit Posts for Fall 2025

September 22nd Skipped this today.   September 19th Skipped this today. September 17th The decision on interest rates was announced before class. What they are deciding on is a target for a rate; but it's not a rate that you or I have access to. Instead it is a rate used by banks between themselves. It's ... kind of ... the rate they all have in common. The thinking is that other rates that are less common will move in tandem with this one (and yes, they do tend to fairly strongly). They also don't set a rate anymore, rather they set a quarter point range in which it can fluctuate.  I showed a graph in class, but you should redo that search (since it was so close to the announcement that the data had not been updated yet). To see their upper limit on that range, you can use keywords like " FRED FOMC upper limit ". It is now 4.25%/year. The lower limit is 0.25%/year lower. The upper and lower limits were dropped by 0.25%/year. You will sometimes hear this referred ...
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Module 4 Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2024

For April 1 (rescheduled from March 27) In a red state like Utah, it can be hard to convince macroeconomics students of facts about Democrats. One point I try to stress is that all elected officials like to spend money on their pet government "programs". Perhaps Republicans are a little less inclined to do this. Both parties try pretty hard to sell the ideas that Democrats always want to spend more and Republicans always want to cut spending. There isn't much evidence to support this. The same thing happens with taxes. All elected officials like to cut taxes because they think this will help them get your vote. Perhaps Democrats are a little less inclined to do this. Both parties try pretty hard to sell the idea that Republicans always want to cut taxes and Democrats always want to raise them. Again, the evidence is pretty weak on this. The reality is that both parties have bought in hard to the Keynesian idea that increasing government spending and cutting taxes will imp...
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Module 3 Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2024

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For March 18 I announced in class that I would skip this one because I couldn't get the article link I wanted to use to open properly. I'll see if I can get it ready for Friday. So that make this one the last one that will appear on Test 3. For March 15 A month ago we looked at the big 4 recession indicators. I was worried because we had 2 reds in January, and I said we should keep on eye on the other two. Well, now it looks like this : Those 2 missing ones for January both came in as green. Plus another green one for February. So it's kind of more of the same: some troubling data, but most of it ... isn't. That's been the story for almost 2 years now. For March 13 Yesterday, the BLS announced the CPI and its inflation rate for February. The number came in right around expectations: an increase of 0.4% in prices in February, and an increase of 3.2% over the past year. Here's the press release . On the surface, those seem like pretty small numbers.  BUT, if you ...
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Module 2 Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2024

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For February 19 This will be the last post from which short answer extra credit questions for Test 2 will be drawn. There's an interesting tidbit of data out this week. The FOMC makes monetary policy on behalf of the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank).  The FOMC walks a fine line, since they make decisions about setting interest rates. On one hand, they want to be open about their decisions. On the other hand, a lot of money is invested to figure out what they're going to do before they do it.  One way they balance these is that they do release the minutes of their 1.5 day meetings, but not until about a month after the meeting. Today we got the minutes from the January meeting covered earlier this semester. Armchair-macroeconomists and politicians will tell you that inflation is down. End of story.  Then the politicians say "Yeah us!" But there's more to it, since inflation tends to be persistent. And it can ignite again, sort of like the embers of a dying f...
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