The Ambrosini Critique

In November, Japanese unemployment was at 5.2%.

Many folks are comparing the Fed’s action today to those of the Bank of Japan in the “lost decade” (e.g.). I can’t quite peg down the comparison being made by Sumner, but Yglesias articulated it most clearly:

[Bernanke] knows that unemployment is a problem now and he believes that he could fight it, but that fighting it more aggressively would elevate the risk of inflation in the future and he thinks that reducing the possibility of future inflation is more important than reducing the reality of current unemployment. I think that’s nuts. But it’s an attitude the Bank of Japan has consistently maintained since the 1990s.

Here’s the employment to population ratio:

Its safe to say employment wasn’t a problem in the “lost decade” and there wasn’t too much weight put on inflation relative to unemployment.

From MarketWatch: [St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard] said he would like the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee “to adopt a state-contingent policy rule that would allow for the adjustment of asset purchases as new information on the economy becomes available.”

If I don’t have my Fed decoder ring on backwards, I would take “state-contingent policy” to be a form of the history contingent policy I predicted the Fed would start talking about. BTW, Bullard wants the market to stop looking at interest rate policy as the only indicator of monetary policy. He’s also sitting on the FOMC this year.

At 4:27 pm, a magnatude 6.5 earthquake hit about 27 miles due east west of my childhood home:

Everyone in the family is accounted for and fine (it turns out half were out of town for a cheerleading contest). Broken glass everywhere. Mom says, “We forget so quickly about earthquakes and start stacking glass on glass and not tying anything down.” A few gas leaks reported in town and one fire.

The woman dog-sitting for my dad said she heard a collapsed roof killed someone. Let’s hope its just rumor.

UPDATE from CNN:

Dave Magni, owner of the Ivanhoe Hotel in Ferndale, said, “We are sitting in a sea of booze” after the quake. He felt an aftershock while talking with CNN. “My employees are out in the parking lot right now,” he added.

UPDATE from the Ferndale Enterprise twitter feed: “Flashback to 1992….not as bad…damage not as bad”.

The 1992 Earthquake was much larger at magnitude 7.2, but it was centered further, and a mountain range, away.

UPDATE: Good to see the Palace has power.

UPDATE from the Enterprise: “#Ferndale quiet now after #earthquake. Crab feed on at the Veterans Hall. Why waste it?”

UPDATE: Twumboldt has a more steady stream of updates.

The numbers guy goes after Knittel’s Woods study. I’m not sure Knittel and coauthor having had to take a mulligan should be seen as an embarrassment. BB (”before blogs”), to get the same feedback they got within hours, they would have had to wait for months or years, travelling from department to department and conference to conference presenting their paper.

Its funny that we always talk about the end of journals in the age of the internet, but this incident makes me wonder if the end of academic seminars is near.

Agent Contnjdida… AC says macro should be taught as a branch of computational economics.

If I had made that connection two years ago I would have been on the job market this year.

Slide 1 shows the path, from the year 2000 to the present, of one key indicator of monetary policy, the target for the overnight federal funds rate set by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

— Ben Bernanke