That's Interesting
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The Coast Guard Just Busted a Garlic-Smuggling Operation in the Caribbean
05th July, 2019Unlike other forms of smuggling that often involves illegal or banned substances, garlic is smuggled primarily for economic reasons.
“As part of the recent trade war between China and the United States, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese garlic of 10 percent.”
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IMF Working Paper – Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide
30th May, 2019“The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interest rates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature; it is a policy choice. The central message of this paper is that with readily available tools a central bank can enable deep negative rates whenever needed—thus maintaining the power of monetary policy in the future to end recessions within a short time.”
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Tariffs on China are no substitute for a trade deal
30th May, 2019Podcast Episode: “In a special episode of Dollar and Sense, Senior Fellow David Dollar provides an update on the state of U.S.-China trade talks following the latest round of negotiations in Washington this week.”
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NPR Planet Money Podcast: Will China Overtake The US?
30th May, 2019“It seems inevitable that eventually China will have a bigger overall economy than the United States.
George Magnus doesn’t agree. He’s an academic and the author of a book about China called Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy. And he says there are three reasons why China’s rise to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy is not inevitable.”
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Assessing Abenomics: Evidence from Inflation-Indexed Japanese Government Bonds
30th May, 2019Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paper assessing the impact of news concerning the reforms associated with “Abenomics” using an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields.
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San Fran Fed: Does the Fed Know More about the Economy?
30th April, 2019‘In assessing the current or near-term state of the economy, forecasts from Federal Reserve staff seem to provide little additional information to improve commercial forecasts. However, Fed forecasts for economic growth a year or more in the future substantially enhance the accuracy of private-sector forecasts.’
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Household Debt, Consumption, and Monetary Policy in Australia
30th April, 2019‘This paper discusses the evolution of the household debt in Australia and finds that while higher-income and higher-wealth households tend to have higher debt, lower-income households may become more vulnerable to rising debt service over time.’
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RBA: A Model of the Australian Housing Market
26th March, 2019“We build an empirical model of the Australian housing market that quantifies interrelationships between construction, vacancies, rents and prices. We find that low interest rates (partly reflecting lower world long-term rates) explain much of the rapid growth in housing prices and construction over the past few years. Another demand factor, high immigration, also helps explain the tight housing market and rapid growth in rents in the late 2000s. A large part of the effect of interest rates on dwelling investment, and hence GDP, works through housing prices.”
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St Louis Fed: How Has Trade Affected U.S. Manufacturing Jobs?
09th January, 2019‘Recent U.S. manufacturing job losses attributed to Chinese imports seem small compared with monthly turnover of the entire U.S. labor market, and the share of recent losses also seems small when looking at long-term declines in manufacturing employment.’
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