For days, my feed has been full of folks snarking at a PhD who chose a slightly silly topic that probably didn't need dissertation-level treatment. Meanwhile, the CEO of America's only credible candidate for a TSMC competitor just resigned, which is basically an admission that

Pwned, every last one of us

Valerie Ramey's IMF Mundell-Fleming lecture is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding why governments accumulated so much debt. It describes the evolution of mainstream macro thinking about fiscal sustainability in the run-up to COVID. There was a widespread belief

Have you ever wondered how social networks differ by gender? Check out my team's new dataset, which uses Facebook data to measure regional differences in social networks by gender all across the world! A 🧵 with examples, a description of our methodology, and a download link:

I think one of the most misleading idea is that Trump is like Milei. Milei actually shrank the deficit. Mostly by cutting funding to states where the real waste is. Not by cutting social programs. Which is why poverty is going down in Argentina.

Great piece about how covid shaped the current era nytimes.com/interactive/20… via @NYTOpinion

Sobering on just how unusual the combination of dollar and interest rate moves are (especially on a day with a fantastic CPI print). From the EvercoreISI team led by Krishna Guha.

Real GDP fell at a 0.3% annual rate in Q1. The underlying numbers are very extreme--with an enormous increase in imports and inventories. My preferred measure of "core GDP" a better signal, up at a 3.0% annual rate (see next)

Pascal Michaillat I think times were just different. A model was a story, showing that it held up in a framework that somewhat made sense (individually optimal, and markets cleared). Now it’s less about storytelling, and more about showing that a big quantitative mess can “account for the data”

A new blog discusses how U.S. money market funds experienced strong cash inflows in Q1 2025, pushing their assets to $7.4 trillion by quarter-end. financialresearch.gov/the-ofr-blog/2… Federal Reserve Treasury Department #ONRRP

“Fifty years from now, you will want to be able to look in the mirror and know that you did what you thought was right, in every part of your life. At the end of the day, your integrity is all you have.” Jay Powell federalreserve.gov/newsevents/spe…

New Barro paper is a defense of 1970s-style disequilibrium models over New Keynesian models… …but amusingly after reviewing the math for 20 pages, the conclusion drops: ‘anyway I’m still not convinced sticky prices/wages are important’

A new blog on OFR’s Q4 2024 Hedge Fund Monitor shows a 9% quarter-over-quarter decline in repo borrowing to $2.5 trillion. READ MORE: financialresearch.gov/the-ofr-blog/2…

CBO finds that OBBBA raises deficits by $2.4T over 10 years. This happens to be exactly The Budget Lab's conventional score of tariff revenue over 2026-35 should June 1 rates stay permanent. One might be tempted then to say OBBBA is deficit-neutral net of tariffs. However... 1/3

What macroeconomists should know about local projections and vector autoregressions, with concrete recommendations for applied practice, from José Luis Montiel Olea, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, Eric Qian, and Christian Wolf nber.org/papers/w33871

preview of my Tuesday morning piece: The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” Eliminates the Office of Financial Research, Threatening the Stability of the Treasury Market

The Trump Administration has cancelled the research grant of America's foremost mathematician, in case you had any lingering doubt as to whether or not they were committed to actually advancing science.

In the last few years we've seen: - The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer - The Storming of the Capitol and pipe bombs left at the RNC and DNC - The break-in to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and the brutal on Paul Pelosi - Multiple assassination attempts against Trump - The assassination

If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it's not even close. nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/…