Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A New Resource

If you're interested in following the direction of the economy at a fairly academic level, the New York branch of the Federal Reserve has begun a new blog, Liberty Street Economics. There are more than 60 economists working in the New York Fed's Research and Statistics Group, with access to a huge amount of economic data, so this promises to be full of pertinent information.

For example, the first post presents a graph showing that Americans' non-mortgage debt (credit cards, car loans, etc.) stayed fairly steady, at around $200 billion per year, for most of the past decade, before plunging into negative territory in 2009. It's currently back up to around $50 billion per year. That's a huge move, and says a lot about what happened to our economy in the past couple of years.

Many of these posts will be for experts only - it will take a very keen mind to get through the upcoming post on "Calibrating Regulatory Minimum Capital Requirements." On the other hand, there is also a post scheduled to discuss the question "How Much Will the Rise in Commodity Prices Reduce Discretionary Income?" That's the kind of issue that affects all of us. If there are more general questions like that addressed in the future, this blog could provide some valuable insight into the workings of our economy.

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