The final, regularly scheduled spring-2020 Morning Macro segment, “Last Resort,” will air Monday, April 27th on South Dakota Public Radio during In the Moment, shortly after 11 am CST. This segment will lead to a noon-hour event, “Money Matters: Macroeconomic Policy in a Pandemic and What It Means for Main Street,” hosted by the Rotary Club […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs Monday, April 13. In recent weeks, macroeconomic sentiments have shifted dramatically: the U.S. economy has likely exited the longest peacetime expansion phase of the business cycle; a macroeconomic recession looms large.  Nevertheless, an impartial, empirical, and persuasive demonstration of this claim of trouble […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, March 30. This post draws on research conducted in the Ness School of Management and Economics by Kailie S. Drescher, a graduate student and Dykhouse Fellow who is writing her master’s thesis on the effects of heterogeneous U.S. state-level economic performance on […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, March 16. On Sunday evening, March 15th, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve System convened an unscheduled meeting—the second in as many weeks—to take drastic action in the federal funds market: amid myriad uncertainties surrounding the novel coronavirus, […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, March 2. Although no one knows how the novel coronavirus will affect the global and U.S. economies, everyone agrees the outcome will be inferior to what would have occurred had the virus not struck.  Putting aside for now the (significant) public-health consequences, […]

 This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, January 27. In the last episode of Morning Macro (“California Dreaming“), I alluded to the presidential address that Alvin Hansen delivered at the 51st annual meeting of the American Economic Association (Detroit, Michigan, December 28, 1938), where Hansen spoke on “secular stagnation—sick […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, January 13. Earlier this month, the American Economic Association (AEA) held its annual meeting—a three-day conference during which hundreds of speakers present their detailed economic analyses of myriad social science issues.  Each year, the AEA annual meeting is held in conjunction […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, December 16. Last Friday, December 13th, the U.S. Census Bureau reported its advanced estimates for retail and food-services sales for November 2019.  The report underwhelmed, signaling lower-than-expected sales during a crucial holiday-shopping month.  According to the Wall Street Journal, “Consumers held […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, December 2. Interest rates attract enormous attention in the financial press, and no wonder: credit—and, so, the cost of financing credit—supports many of the economic activities in which households, firms, and governments around the world engage.  In this regard, the U.S. […]

  This blog post accompanies the SDPR Morning Macro segment that airs on Monday, November 18. The U.S. economy has been in the expansion phase of its business cycle since the second quarter of 2009—the end of the Great Recession a decade ago.  An expansion is one of four so-called phases of a business cycle; the other […]