Recent posts by Economists and Policy Experts on Bluesky

Lutnick's girlfriend? Oh well, she's in Canada. *LUTNICK SAYS HE HAS TRADE DEAL PENDING APPROVAL *LUTNICK SAYS HE WON'T NAME COUNTRY HE NEARLY HAS DEAL WITH

Great to see @atlantafed.bsky.social posting here. I verified that it's really them. Follow them for lots of great information about the U.S. economy! #EconSky #NumbersDay

Productivity is Canada’s Achilles heel. And Mark Carney is more economist than politician, says @bobburgess.bsky.social. This is a challenge he’s well suited to take on ⬇️

Great to see @atlantafed.bsky.social posting here. I verified that it's really them. Follow them for lots of great information about the U.S. economy!

I think stocks are: -very focused on possible trade headlines over the next 1-2 weeks -correctly realizing that the hard data hasn’t rolled over and isn’t likely to roll over within the next 2-3 weeks -generally not thinking much about where the economy/earnings might be 3+ months from now

losing my mind here! $500 billion would still be by far the largest medicaid cuts in us history! “moderate” don bacon says he’s okay with the largest medicaid cuts ever. they just can’t be an even bigger version of the largest medicaid cuts ever

I am constantly blown away by the brilliance of our students @jhu.edu and had a wonderful time speaking at the Africa Business Club conference this weekend. Truly excellent conference and highly recommend everyone check out their events: carey.jhu.edu/student-expe...

This scene can only happen under an authoritarian regime.

Assemble the Horde! Let the great plains be covered in the gold of our tent camps!

Great to have @atlantafed.bsky.social on here! First post was 3 days ago. #EconSky

Yeesh, more signals of weakness for 2025Q1 GDP flowing in today. I am attending to the gold-adjusted model.

Note that the Nazis did this with ghetto currency. Again & again Israel embraces Nazi Germany's tactics, strategies and goals. I'm the grandchild of holocaust survivors; my solidarity is with my people who fill the mass graves of Eastern Europe and the Palestinian people experiencing genocide today

Pritzker taking this tack is very interesting

Absolutely enormous list of comments from the April Texas Service Sector survey the Dallas Fed released this morning. www.dallasfed.org/research/sur...

Also someone give MBJ tenure already. Skip the tenure track. Straight to tenure

Editorial: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has picked the worst possible moment to consider loosening a crucial financial system safeguard

Still impressed when I see progressive men with big platforms almost exclusively reposting and quote posting other men. It's a men's world, their timeline is shouting for all to see.

Amazon already walked it back, but the replies to this are incredible

EPI's @ahecon.bsky.social is testifying NOW at a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing. He'll be talking about Trump's tariffs and industrial policy. Watch the hearing here: oversight.house.gov/hearing/made...

Today we launched a great new essay collection including work from 2 dozen scholars and exploring A-Z progressive policy ideas: everything from AI to UBI. We can make a strong and inclusive economy, safety net, and democracy. Let this be the start of a new conversation.

Here is my essay on full employment: rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/full-em...

quote from @jessicabriedl.bsky.social, @brendanvduke.bsky.social, and me in this article on DOGE, but Jessica’s killer quote makes it into the headline DOGE: not successful by any means i would add one caveat: not successful at its alleged mission, but successful at destroying some core functions

GDP numbers come out tomorrow in the final prediction from the atlanta fed, line go down

I am pretty sure that a game theorist can produce a model under which unleashing "strategic uncertainty" and financial market chaos can eventually benefit the U.S., but I am even more certain that it would bear no resemblance to what actually took place in the White House.

I go back and forth on this one. Gas taxes are a relatively efficient way to fund the highway trust fund because they're very correlated with wear and tear (they're a function of miles driven & weight). This is less efficient; ideally you'd scale it by weight at least.

Here's "fewer jobs in 6 months" from the consumer confidence survey. Big test here of soft vs hard data in the labor market:

Even as everyone knew the housing market was collapsing, 5 million Americans were still buying homes in 2007:

Federal government layoffs are visible in the data, but they're just not that large in magnitude. That could very well reflect the fact that many people are on admin. leave or have received layoff notices but haven't yet formally lost their jobs. So we'll see what this looks like in a few months.

Trump worries he’s getting “tapped along” by Putin in Ukraine. Yes he is, and no he doesn’t need to be, writes @marcchampion1.bsky.social

Dallas attorney Clay Jackson talked with a family of immigrants about their legal rights. Government agents—who refused to identify themselves—came to his home to threaten him. When he spoke out, his firm Fidelity National Financial *fired* him. We REJECT authoritarian rule in the United States.

This is my favorite ever Onion piece. CC: @bencollins.bsky.social Can we get some 1080p re-uploads of these classics for modern audiences? www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkW...

2.14 American employees quit their job for each employee fired by their boss in March, per #JOLTS release today. This #LaborLeverageRatio proxies for workers' bargaining power in their job, rise from 1.83 driven by 3% rise in quits & 12% fall in layoffs+discharges. www.upjohn.org/labor-levera...

house transportation and infrastructure reconciliation text is out, and let's see what they're doi- oh, they're imposing registration fees on green vehicles

*AMAZON SAYS TARIFF PLAN ON SITE 'NEVER A CONSIDERATION': WAPO

forgive me for the wild off-expertise speculation/raving but ... there's something in this about how narcissists manage to get codependents to project salvation onto them (or maybe codependents just do it to anyone who stands still / asks them for anything)...

Does #fintwit value the information that flows from the federal statistical system? They better get up to speed and weigh in.

Well @captgouda24.bsky.social is 100% correct here: Keep your eye on rising-star economist Dev Patel, who is an extraordinary talent—>

2.14 American employees quit their job for each employee fired by their boss in March, per #JOLTS release today. This #LaborLeverageRatio proxies for workers' bargaining power in their job, rise driven by a 16% rise in quits & 17% fall in layoffs+discharges. www.upjohn.org/labor-levera...

There were 7.2 million job openings on the last day of March, down from 7.5 million in February (which was also revised down slightly). The job openings rate has now fallen below its prepandemic peak, but it's still high by historical standards. #NumbersDay

Does #fintwitter value the information that flows from the federal statistical system? They better get up to speed and weigh in.

I'm in @ftopinion explaining what I'll be looking for in tomorrow's GDP release. There will be much more real & measurement error noise than usual do to massive trade timing shifts so critical to look at "core GDP", which is the sum of consumer spending + fixed investment. www.ft.com/content/5857...

*orange* man..... *orange* free state ... the math is mathing

March JOLTS miss - 7.19mm openings vs 7.50mm exp and 7.57mm prior (revised down to 7.48). Layoffs lower than expected & quits beat, so not all bad news, but private hires still pretty soft. Conference Board Consumer Confidence whiffs, lowest expectations since 2011.

Still no sign of the labor market cracking in the latest JOLTS data. Job openings edged down, but hiring was flat and layoffs actually fell slightly. #NumbersDay Full data: www.bls.gov/news.release...

3rd straight day of IG CDX flat-to-wider. Implied equity vols have been firmish the past two days as well:

preliminary cost estimates from CBO for the education & workforce reconciliation bill, subject to change. rs are overshooting their instruction by $21 billion. reminder: ~$210 billion of this is getting rid of SAVE, so it's ~$140 billion in cuts relative to what people are currently experiencing.

A way that behavioral economists can be genuinely useful is helping firms understand how they can best make the costs of tariffs most salient to consumers

this can only be said by someone who knows very little about supply chains

What's so funny is that these billionaires thought they knew Trump better than normal people and could take advantage of him until it was too late.

Amazon offers free advertising for the Administration's signature initiative, and for some reason the White House regards this as hostile. When I make smart decisions that make the world a better place, I'm usually proud of it, and want the everyone to know about it. So what's different here?

The US goods trade deficit jumped to another record high in the preliminary March data released today, beating the previous record high set in January—there was a massive rush to import consumer goods before more tariffs went in place.

Remember the days when shortages were seen as an exclusive problem of socialism? Trump seems to be set to prove to the world that policy design under capitalism, too, can create a shortage economy.

NEW: Americans need a government that delivers stability and security—not chaos. Our new essay collection brings together great minds to imagine how democracy can better deliver the economy Americans need and want. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Trump feels a lot like an LLM incarnated. Real stochastic parrot vibes.

This is exactly right, and it's also playing out with the youngest voting cohort just as hard (albeit for different reasons). You can't just nuke Shein and Temu as well as the business model for every influencer under the sun and expect the broccoli hairs to keep swinging your way.

Streisand effect

I wish nothing but ruin for all of them.

Thank you, Roberts Court, for bringing this mind-boggling corruption into existence. Couldn't have happened without you guys! www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/u...

Advance goods trade data doesn't have the granularity we need to see gold flows, which are skewing things a bit, but when we back out all imports in the category that includes them we see a further acceleration. Tariff front running accelerated sharply in March, as you'd expect.

I want to emphasize something here: there is no universe where a President with cratering, sub-40 approvals can just dictate to the American business community. These people do not understand the contingencies they depend on. *AMAZON PLAN TO SHOW TARIFF COSTS A 'HOSTILE' ACT, LEAVITT SAYS

Cope & seethe, you literally did this one to yourself

I'm skeptical there's political oxygen for a new cash benefit, but Trump has endorsed "baby bonuses" now twice, so I wrote about them and the different versions of the proposal floating around DC these days www.vox.com/policy/41079...

I've really enjoyed Prof. Wolfers appearances over the last few weeks. Especially when he disassembles talking heads on live television. Quality stuff.

I grew up in Montana. We all thought of Canadians as our cousins, teasing each other the way you josh with old school-friends. The act of turning CANADA into our enemy—seething about American "betrayal"—is one of the stupidest, most shameful acts by modern US politicians entrusted with state power.

My daughter already recognizes the UCL theme song, it just came on during a podcast in the car and she yelled “they playing soccer!” Footie sickos rejoice.

We’re recapping 100 days of Trump in 30 minutes. LIVE NOW with @timobrien.bsky.social, @davidmdrucker.bsky.social and @niamalika.bsky.social 🎥

The speed and incompetence with which they have tried to enact his agenda have led to real blowback. They done serious damage but I am more optimistic at 100 days than I was in January.

Delighted to be at the EU Council today to talk about own resources for the EU We need a minimum tax on ultra-high net worth individuals We know we can do it And it would generate a lot of (much needed) revenue! www.taxobservatory.eu//www-site/up...

I wrote about "baby bonuses" — the research, the history, and why the messenger matters www.vox.com/policy/41079...

I’m bullish on the outlook for west coast urban governance and university governance from here. Maybe it’s a bounce back from 2020-23, maybe it’s local pressure, not sure if Trump fits in, but it’s another thing moving in the right direction after a period of dysfunction.

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, yet another admin of a Mastodon instance has decided to step down after receiving literally years of abuse Volunteers run social media services are hard to run, even more when swaths of your core userbase is the typical Mastodon idiotic extremist

The economy Trump inherited was the envy of the world. Within weeks, consumer confidence was plummeting, businesses were pausing expansions and investors were questioning the safety of Treasuries. Forecasters debated which was more likely: a recession or stagflation. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Germany leads, Greece follows *GREECE REQUESTS ESCAPE CLAUSE ACTIVATION FOR DEFENSE SPENDING

Oh yikes *UPS 1Q ADJ EPS $1.49, EST. $1.40 *UPS TO PROVIDE 2Q OUTLOOK DURING 1Q EARNINGS CALL *UPS NOT PROVIDING ANY UPDATES TO PREVIOUSLY ISSUED YEAR OUTLOOK *UPS NOT UPDATING OUTLOOK GIVEN MACROECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY

Identification police, the future is yours.

Low-key considering doing a "Make Expertise Relevant Again" hat

If anyone makes such a t-shirt, please know that my money is yours already

when glen miller shows up in a 1940s movie i always think man that must have been nuts... like seeing rihanna show up in a movie now

This is very good and anticipates some of my own thoughts on the geopolitics of this moment. I have much more to say, but this is an excellent starting point.

But does he have any thoughts on the R/Stata debate?

yes... ha ha ha... yes!

Write it on my tombstone

That’s the only possible visual representation of the Canadian election. The only way it gets more accurate would be an orange dude jumping onto the ice and clotheslining the dude skating to the empty net.

"I'm going to govern in econometrics" is a winning campaign slogan for the ages.

I think I might be in love… 😍😍😍😍

Let this be a warning to you all: nobody steals my charts and gets to be Prime Minister of Canada

I think Trump’s achievement here has no parallel in modern democratic history. He singlehandedly flipped a national election in another country, it’s truly impressive.

We’ve reached the point in Canadian election coverage where it’s the patriotic duty of all Brazilians to point out that we would have finished counting the votes by now.

it’s Bill Kristol binch, get on the antifascist hype train 🔥

Jon Levin, the current Stanford President, was an advisee of Paul Klemperer at Nuffield College. Mark Carney, the current and likely future Prime Minister of Canada, was an advisee of Meg Meyer at Nuffield College. Meg and Paul are my favorite economics power couple.

Okay looks like that conservative spike was kinda looney:

what I’m gathering after I missed one hour of the internet is that Canadian liberals had the fastest “it’s so over—we’re so back” in election history

The US military is a superb and honorable fighting force. It is an unspeakable perversion of their mission to deploy them in our homeland to “prevent crime”. Illegal and terrifying. Conservative and Liberal Americans reject military rule in the United States.

Okay @peark.es I’m in the game.

I do not believe the Heat will win this series.

Eek

Come on, I want some Canadian election results. Don't they do exit polls in Canada? If they were the 51st state, there would be exit polls.

And we cannot say enough: Republicans are trying to push through the largest Medicaid cuts in US history (currently held by Reagan)

A point I’ve been working on trying to make is that DOGE hasn’t been succeeding at making large scale cuts to total spending - but has been demolishing select crucial services