Jason Furman
Professor of Practice at Harvard. Teaches Ec 10, some tweets might be educational. Also Senior Fellow @PIIE. Was Chair of President Obama's CEA.
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How to think about what the Fed should and will do (which I expect are largely the same)? My modal expectation is that the FFR will peak at 5.25% (bottom of the range) in 2023 but...
The FOMC's median forecast for the unemployment rate likely would trigger the @Claudia_Sahm rule which has been a perfect recession predictor (a 0.5pp increase in the three month m...
The decline in the imputed price for "Portfolio management and investment advice services" in July subtracted 1.3pp (annual rate) from PCE inflation in July (a mechanical function...
The FOMC raised rates by 75bp to 3-3.25%. This was expected. Markets seem surprised by the dots--they show rates rising to 4.4% at the end of 2022 and 4.6% at the end of 2023. Goo...
The Fed's target PCE measure of inflation was lowered 0.9pp (annual rate) over the last six months by a quirk in how BEA imputes a non-market price for investment advice. Core inf...
Question about the NY Fed's Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG) from @dolanecon. I haven't looked at it before but would be very reluctant to put much weight on an experimental measur...
The median CPI, which excludes all the large changes in either direction and is better predicted by labor market slack, is out and is extremely ugly. A 9.2% annual rate in August,...
It is a theorem that if you take below-average items out of your inflation measure then your measure will go down. That is, indeed, true of shelter this month. But it's not quant...
It's a good exercise to remember what your views were a few months ago and revise and update based on the data. A lot of people thought the high core inflation readings in the spr...
CPI report not pretty. Headline fine (0.1% CPI for Aug or a 1.4% annual rate in that month, with prices up 8.3% over the last year). Problem is excluding volatile food and energy...
Yesterday I posited the case for lump sum subsidies instead of electricity subsidies. Got two good arguments for subsidies, but I would still want to understand how these compare t...
Fleshing out my thoughts on the scariest macroeconomics paper of 2022: "Understanding U.S. Inflation During the COVID Era" by Larry Ball, Daniel Leigh, & Prachi Mishra. This 𧡠expa...