The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended their two-day meeting today the same way they have been for months now: keeping the target for the Fed funds rates between and 0.25%, and claiming that the economy continues to recover, albeit very slowly:
Although economic activity is likely to remain weak [...]
Release Date: December 16, 2009
For immediate releaseInformation received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in November suggests that economic activity has continued to pick up and that the deterioration in the labor market is abating. The housing sector has shown some signs of [...]
I tell my classes that to have a vibrant economy, people generally need to have the freedom to choose who to buy from and who to sell to. Taxes, subsidies, price controls, and other things of that nature ultimately discourage economic activity because at some point they each take away [...]
Despite recent optimism about the apparent renaisance of growth in the Japanese economy, and the heightened sense of enthusiasm which surrounds the surge in economic activity right across the Asian continent there are considerable grounds for caution about the sustainability of the Japanese recovery itself.
The first of these is to [...]
The rebound in the sales and prices of houses in Canada has been making quite a few headlines. That's not bad news, but for those of us looking for signs of recovery, what really matters is whether or not it is being translated into real economic activity.
Calculated Risk noted [...]
LATELY, Tyler Cowen has been pushing an Austrian view of economic activity in China, namely, that government policies are generating far [...]
At last, a translation for The Rest of Us:
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September suggests that economic activity has continued to pick up.
We successfully talked some people into rebuilding inventory and spending money they don't have. Suckers.
[...]The Berlin Wall's impact on trade patterns persists
TO FOLLOW up a bit on the discussion earlier this week on German economic integration, post reunification, here's a new research result from Volker Nitsch and Nikolaus Wolf:Why do borders still matter for economic activity? The reunification of Germany in 1990 [...]
