Section 2 Extra Credit Sources for Fall 2022

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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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Section V Extra Credit Sources (for Tufte's ECON 2020, All Sections, Spring 2022)

For 4/15, 4/18 and 4/20 If there's big news, I'll cover it.  Just a super minor piece of news. I said in Chapter 11 that changing the reserve ratio is no longer used by our central bank as a monetary policy too, but it is sometimes still used by other central banks. China's central bank cut their reserve ratio on the 15th. This is an expansionary policy: being required to keep less money in the vault, means that banks can make more loans. China has been pursuing expansionary monetary policy with this policy tool since 2011, as shown in the top graph on this link . Except, for this one. CM in the 11 am class sent in an article entitled  " Two Wisconsin gas stations are suing a competitor for its low fuel prices ". It is tangentially related to inflation. Basically, gas stations are trying to use the legal system to make sure customers have to buy gas at the more expensive price they'd like to charge. Yes, this is dumb. But legislators and bureaucrats fall for t...
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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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