Receiving a summons for your outstanding debts can be an alarming experience, especially if it’s your first time to get one. What do you do so you won’t get sued? What is the right way to send an answer? While the obvious move is to consult with a lawyer right away, that is not always …
You’re about to go grocery shopping so you head to the ATM to withdraw some cash from your bank account only to find out that your account is frozen! You call up your bank and you are told that a creditor levied your bank account…again! You’re confused thinking that you’ve already satisfied your previous debt. …
Economists of all stripes are baffled by continued economic weakness in the United States. The easiest way to see the weakness is to compare where we are in terms of GDP today relative to historical trend growth, something we did in a previous post. It is clear that one of the main drivers of this weakness …
A strong 2014Q2 GDP report came out today, registering in at 4% annualized real GDP growth. This is good news and could mean that soon Americans will have more means for reducing debt burdens, but it is worth looking at it in the context of the full recovery. Much of the recovery data was also …
A month ago, we compared the recovery from the Great Recession to the recovery after every recession since 1950. It looked pretty bad. Real GDP growth for 2014q1 was revised downward today to -3.0% on an annualized basis. Yes, our reading of Table 1.1.3 of NIPA shows -3.0%, not -2.9%. Here is real GDP indexed to the …
The central argument we make in our book is that the housing bust in combination with excessive household debt burdens were the key drivers of the economic downturn. Failure to more adequately address the housing disaster was the greatest policy mistake made in the Great Recession. One way to see the scars of the housing bust is …
Sorry we’ve been busy with the book, but will get back to posting soon. Here are some book-related links in case you’ve missed them: New York Times: The Case Against the Bernanke-Obama Financial Rescue Economist Free Exchange: The Opposite of Insurance Paul Krugman (NYT): Springtime for Bankers Book Interview on RT Boom/Bust Washington Post: Why Tim …
In the face of large-scale economic shocks, enforcing debt contracts places an unbearable burden on debtors, who cut back their spending and send the entire economy into deep recession. One of the main arguments we make in our new book is that debt forgiveness makes a lot of sense when the economy experiences a large-scale negative shock that …
We answer this question in our post for Fivethirtyeight.com. Here’s an extract. In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, destroying $6.2 trillion in household wealth over the next two years. Five years later, the housing market crashed, and from 2007 to 2009, the value of real estate owned by U.S. households fell by nearly the same amount — …
Why the Housing Bubble Tanked the Economy And the Tech Bubble Didn’t Read More »
Here are some places to buy it online: The book is officially available for purchase. Here are some places to buy it online: Amazon University of Chicago Press Here are some very early reviews of both the book and the blog (more are coming): Christina D. Romer, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers “Mian …
