Section 2 Extra Credit Sources for Fall 2022

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Section 1 Extra Credit Sources for Fall 2022

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For September 27 GDP data is released at the end of each month in the U.S. The next release is Thursday before class.  GDP is measured quarterly in the U.S. After the quarter ends, they spend a month counting things up, and release their first draft on the last Thursday of the next month. A month later, they release a revision, and a month after that the final version. So the news on Thursday morning will be the final revision for 2022 II. So we won't get official information on the current quarter until the end of October. But, for now, economists working for various institutions have been releasing their forecasts about how this quarter looks to them. Calculated Risk has 3 of those in this post . They are actually forecasts for the rate of growth of real GDP, not the actual number. A typical/good rate of growth is 3%/yr. The range is about -2%/yr to about +8%/yr. So these forecasts are not good, but they are positive, indicating that the economy is growing. Generally speaking, y...
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Section I Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2023

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Since I moved the exam back by 1 week, only posts below here (January 30th or earlier) will potentially be sources of extra credit questions on Exam 1. For January 30th We get U.S. macroeconomic data from more than one source. Some comes from the BEA. Another big source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.gov). We also get some from the Census Bureau (they don't just sit around for 10 years between each decennial population census). These agencies release many different measures of the inflation rate (used for different purposes). An important one, because it's used by policymakers in D.C., is the PCE. Measures of this are released at the same time as GDP. Last week's announcement showed a rate of 3.2%/year during 2022 IV. You can find this on FRED, although it might not be the top link in Google. Today it was the second one, and the codename for the data series is PCEPI. If you go there, it shows a graph in which the last couple of years of higher inflation are the ste...
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Section III Extra Credit Posts for Spring 2023

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For March 10 Holy crap (yes, that's the technical term for it). There's been a bank run ... right at the time I'm covering bank runs in class.  This is a still developing story, so expect more posts about this. In fact, many news sites are running live updates on the topic, which some of you may enjoy following. On Friday, SVB, the 18th largest bank in the country was shut down after being driven into bankruptcy by mass withdrawals. Digression: international students will be shocked to learn, and domestic students should learn, that the U.S. has a highly decentralized banking system, composed of thousands of small banks. In fact, "big" American banks are often quite small compared to those in many other countries. This is probably a good thing: it helps spread out risk. Anyway, problems with SVB apparently started appearing early last week (I missed it too). By Thursday, there were mass withdrawals, and on Friday the state of California shut them down, and handed...
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