In a blogpost taking stock of the IMF conference on lessons from the crisis, the Nobel laureate distills the lessons learned.

The Heritage Foundation's Salim Furth writes:

Mortgage buyer and insurer Fannie Mae was in the news again this week.

The impact of contractionary fiscal policies, from NY Times, based on Moody's Analytics estimates.

Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written Hiro Ito (Portland State U.) and Ulrich Volz (U. London SOAS and DIE). This article is based Ito and Volz (RIE, 2013).

Broad market indicators like the S&P500; have been making all-time nominal highs. What's the significance of that for investors and the economy?

Crowding Out Watch, Continued

The end of the semester has arrived, and as I prepared my last lecture, I checked to see how the government deficits had impacted yields. Real yields were pretty much as they were when the semester began in January.

In a graphically interesting discussion of the April employment situation release, James Sherk and Salim Furth write:

Beginning with the third quarter of this year, the BEA plans to report the U.S. GDP and national income accounts on a new basis. One of the purposes of the change is to better reflect the importance of intellectual capital and technological innovation in the modern economy. These changes are expected to cause the reported value of GDP to be about 3% higher than when calculated under the present system. I have been thinking about how I would explain these changes to an undergraduate economics class, and this is what I came up with.

How much of the US employment shortfall is due to trend factors?

Quick links to a few items I found of interest:

• The Congressional Budget Office has prepared informative slides summarizing the U.S. fiscal situation (via Business Insider)
• Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers referee the Reinhart-Rogoff debate (via Free Exchange)
• Herndon, Ash, and Pollin appear to have been using faulty data for New Zealand
• Bill McBride reviews the U.S. decline in vehicle miles driven
• China's oil imports are down relative to this point last year (via Steven Kopits)

The descent of interest rates to near zero in the advanced economies has prompted something of a rethink of how monetary policy can affect exchange rates.

And a slightly older message from the CBO.

I’m late to the game [1], but it bears repeating: according to the BEA, government spending (either on goods and services, or more broadly including transfers) is declining as a share of GDP.

With all the heated discussions of the last two weeks, it is important to keep perspective on which issues are in dispute and which are not. Let me state plainly something on which I think we ought to be agreed: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff's 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is a valuable work of scholarship that continues to deserve study and praise from any thinking person. Here I review some of my reasons for saying that.

The BEA released today its estimate of 2013 first-quarter real GDP, which grew at a 2.5% annual rate from the previous quarter. That's below the average 3.1% growth rate since World War II, but better than the 2.1% average since the recovery began in 2009:Q3.

From Jason Stein, “State jobs agency adds 3rd finance chief in 2 years, then loses him in a day,” Milwaukee Sentinel Journal (April 24):

Chinn-Ito Index Updated to 2011

I made some comments on Sunday about a recent critique by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of an influential 2010 paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Yesterday Econbrowser hosted a reply from Pollin and Ash to my remarks. Here I would like to add a few further thoughts on this discussion.

Today Econbrowser hosts this guest contribution from Robert Pollin and Michael Ash of the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Today, we have a guest contribution from Marios Zachariadis, Associate Professor of Economics at University of Cyprus.