What To Expect From This Blog

I realize I haven't posted in a couple months, so I thought that a short status post might be valuable. The brief summary is that you are likely to see continued sporadic posts here in the future, though probably less often than before (not that they were ever frequent!) I'm less likely to do updates every month/quarter of certain series of posts I've been covering, though I will make an effort to update them when the data changes in a noteworthy way. For example, the deflationary CPI trend is now becoming apparent to more and more observers and bears revisiting. Remember, Japan's deflation took years to arrive after its asset bubbles peaked. Other past topics likely to be revisited include Modern Monetary Theory, flow of funds data and borrowing trends, macroeconomic and market outlook, stock dividend trends, deflation outside the US, etc. New topics won't be frequent but I do have some some in mind.

I didn't exactly plan to have an economics blog (I'm an engineer, for one thing). I initially set it up as an easy platform to share my macroeconomic and market outlook, distilled from much reading in the econoblogosphere, with a select set of real life acquaintances. However, I subsequently found myself becoming dissatisfied with some gaps in my knowledge and with some of the third party commentary I'd been reading, so I decided to do more digging in raw data myself, wherever possible, rather than only relying on the commentary and analysis of others. And at times the data has seemed worth sharing. I hope some have found it useful — this site has 60+ RSS subscribers via Google Reader (and I don't know how many in other readers) — a small number, especially given that many probably don't read all their feeds, but not zero!

Other than general time constraints, the other reason for the shortage of posts lately is I've been putting a little time into attempting a second macroeconomic visualization that I hope could have broader value, if successful, than the last one (which I know still needs further updates). So if I make progress on it, look for a future post introducing it.

As a bonus for reading this far, and so as to include some actual economic content, here is a chart from an April presentation by Richard Koo that I think is useful and have not seen posted elsewhere:

It's the first actual "picture" of the so-called reverse-square-root-sign recovery that I recall seeing, and nicely shows two things. First, that the "Lehman Shock" probably did contribute to a collapse in confidence and GDP beyond that attributable to the Minsky-style private debt dynamics alone (though contagion and adverse feedback loops were certainly a real risk that could have kept GDP on its downward path, even so). Japan's GDP never fell this dramatically, even after its own giant asset bubbles popped. Second, it shows the uncertain future with respect to the degree of ongoing private sector deleveraging versus government fiscal stimulus.