That's Interesting
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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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BoJ: What Drives China’s Growth? Evidence from Micro-level Data
05th December, 2018The linked Bank of Japan research paper discusses the sustainability of China’s rapid growth mainly based on the estimation of the corporate-level total factor productivity of Chinese listed firms.
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The Great Telegraph Breakthrough of 1866
08th November, 2018“The transatlantic telegraph cable amounted to the information revolution of the day, tying global markets together in unprecedented ways.”
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Planet Money – Episode 864: The Central (Bankers’) Question
07th November, 2018“It used to be central bankers had a powerful lever to guide the pace of the economy: The ability to raise or lower interest rates…But lately, the lever hasn’t been behaving like the textbooks say it should.”
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