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FIRST: Time for Another Victory Lap by the Fed (& the Biden Administration!)

A very nice, nice employment report this AM:

Colby Smith & Peter Wells: US Economy Gained 431,000 jobs in March as Tight Labour Market Persists: ‘Unemployment rate falls to 3.6%…. For every unemployed person in the US there are roughly 1.7 openings…. January and February payrolls were revised higher by a combined 95,000…. Average hourly earnings registered a 0.4 per cent monthly gain, translating to a 5.6 per cent increase from the same period last year…. The share of Americans either employed or looking for work has crept higher, but remains shy of pre-pandemic levels… the labour force participation rate… 62.4 per cent. In February 2020, it stood at 63.4 per cent…
LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/0de891b8-b6bb-4b91-b939-24d008511224>

Half a million a month is our steady-as-she-goes rate of increase in payroll employment:

We are leaving rubber on the road as we rejoin the highway traffic at speed—but that is expected, and, indeed, inevitable: complain about our current inflation and wish we did not have it, and you are wishing we were repeating the catastrophic and disastrous anemic recovery of the early 2010s:

And inflation expectations in the bond market remain very well anchored. And I do not see a path to a wage-price inflationary spiral that would be difficult and painful to resolve without, first, a loss of the expectational inflation anchor in the bond market:

Things that are completely missing from the discussion from the "Oh woe! Inflation is above 2%! Oh woe!”-ers. How do they expect us to make the wheel to our goods-&-deliverator-heavier economy that we need to make without inflation as prices and wages rise in sectors that need to expand? How do they expect us to regain full employment rapidly without inflation? A short burst of inflation is what a rebalancing and wheeling economy does. We did it in 1948 and 1951, and the inflation passed. What is it that is going to make this time different from those times?

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The Ezra Klein Show, with Larry Summers <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-lawrence-summers.html>

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

David Glasner: Three Propagation Mechanisms in Lucas & Sargent <https://uneasymoney.com/2022/03/30/three-propagation-mechanisms-in-lucas-and-sargent/>
Wikipedia: Mystic River (Film) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_River_(film)>
Lutz Kilian & Michael D. Plante: The Russian Oil Supply Shock of 2022: ‘If the bulk of Russian energy exports is off the market for the remainder of 2022, a global economic downturn seems unavoidable… could be more protracted than that in 1991… <https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2022/0322>
Patrick T. Reardon & William Cronon: Nature’s Metropolis Turns 25 <https://edgeeffects.net/natures-metropolis/>
David Epstein: Why Propaganda Works (The “Illusory Truth Effect”) <https://davidepstein.bulletin.com/why-propaganda-works-the-illusory-truth-effect/>
Michael Bérubé & Jennifer Ruth: When Professors’ Speech Is Disqualifying <https://newrepublic.com/article/165649/professors-speech-disqualifying>
Irwin Garfinkel & al.: The Benefits and Costs of a U.S. Child Allowance: ‘Making that expansion permanent would cost $97 billion per year and generate social benefits with net present value of $982 billion per year… <https://www.nber.org/papers/w29854>
Martin Wolf: Rishi Sunak Fails to Address the Hit to Living Standards: ‘It is hard to see a good justification for the chancellor’s decision to leave the most vulnerable worse off… <https://www.ft.com/content/c1f556de-b8e9-400f-a557-c9e8f32461b5>
Robert Citino: Kharkov 1943: The Wehrmacht’s Last Victory <https://www.historynet.com/kharkov-1943-the-wehrmachts-last-victory/?te=1&nl=paul-krugman&emc=edit_pk_20220322>
Guy Gavriel Kay: All the Seas of the World <https://www.lovereading.co.uk/book/22222/All-the-Seas-of-the-World-by-Guy-Gavriel-Kay.html>

Twitter & ‘Stack:

Matthew Yglesias: Develop a Healthier Emotional Relationship with Joe Manchin: ‘Joe Manchin stepped up. Had he retired, the Democratic nominee would have definitely lost to Patrick Morrissey. America is lucky that Shelley Moore Capito is quietly reasonable despite representing a super-duper conservative state. Morrissey isn’t. But Manchin chose to run, and he won. We should all be thankful. Gratitude doesn’t mean always agreeing…

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In some of his disputes with liberals and mainstream Democrats these days, I think Joe Manchin is right on the merits. Other times, he’s wrong. One of my great dreams in life is convincing Manchin that he’s wrong about the filibuster and its impact on our politics. I also think he…

2 months ago · 73 likes · 106 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Matthew C. Klein: How to Dominate the Economic Battlefield with a “Freedom Fund”

The Overshoot

How to Dominate the Economic Battlefield with a "Freedom Fund"

I wrote an essay for Foreign Policy with David Talbot and Jordan Schneider about how the allies should combine and manage their formidable economic strength to combat Russia most effectively. We also discuss how those tools could be deployed in future conflicts against other potential adversaries. The first few paragraphs are below. I hope you go and…

3 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Matthew C. Klein

Charlie Sykes: Too Crazy for Mo Brooks: ‘Trump wanted him to rescind the election…

Morning Shots

Too Crazy for Mo Brooks

Rep. Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama, speaks during a “Save America” rally near the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images Before we get to the latest episode of our culture war, let’s pause to take the measure of the actual war that continues to rage in Ukraine. Some key developments…

3 months ago · 99 likes · 60 comments · Charlie Sykes

Zvi Mowshowitz: More Data & Peace Terms

Don't Worry About the Vase

Ukraine #6: More Data and Peace Terms

I was mostly happy with the Covid-style approach I tried out last time. This is an update of ‘all the things worth noting since then’ but excluding prediction markets. I plan to do a prediction market update next, and keep those two tracks distinct. I do talk a bit about how I would characterize various final settlements, with an aim of getting predicti…

2 months ago · 10 likes · 24 comments · Zvi Mowshowitz

Ken White: Our Fundamental Right to Shame And & the New York Times <

The Popehat Report

Our Fundamental Right To Shame And Shun The New York Times

If you want to be a decent person, you should care about how you treat other people. What else is important in life? It’s right and fit that we discuss how we can treat each other better. Our chat can’t be limited to not punching your little sister or not eating your roommate’s leftover Pad Thai. Most of the time we treat other people kindly or crue…

3 months ago · Ken White

Nicole Barbaro: How Does Life Really Work?: ‘So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World_ by Raghuveer Parthasarathy… self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling… at the core foundation of life…

Bookmarked📚

How Does Life Really Work?

Life is fantastically complex, built by the elegant process of evolution. The more you learn about how life works and what really allows us and every other living thing to be, the more you realize why some people stop trying to understand all together and just point to some mystical being as the creator of al…

3 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Nicole Barbaro, Ph.D.

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Time for Another Victory Lap by þe Fed (& þe…

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