Plain Sense Economics

For a very nice, clear explanation on how trade exports and import impact our GDP, see this posting from Economix.
Written by Bob McTeer, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas:
Foreign trade has become more important to our economy in recent years. Exports and imports of goods and services have grown rapidly. A growing [...]

Just about a year ago, the general consensus in Congresss was that we were in danger of falling into a recession. As the months went by, that seemed less likely, but now, thanks to the NBER we know that actually was the case. Congress passed and the President signed a fiscal policy stimulus in the [...]

The cap and trade process for regulating the negative externality of pollution has been tested for a couple of decades, and recently has had more attention from Kyoto to Pres. Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative. Society (through the government) chooses a limit or cap on pollution of a compound. Then polluting facilities buy and sell [...]

The National Bureau of Economic Research announced on Monday that we are in a recession and that this recession started back in December 2007. As we discuss in class, the common rule of thumb about recessions is that they represent at least two quarters of declining real GDP. Officially, however, NBER and their Business Cycle [...]

The fiscal prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes are seeing a bit of a revival these days. New York Times columnist and blog author Gregory Mankiw wrote a piece in the Sunday edition. Here’s an excerpt:
According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. When the total demand for goods and services [...]