terms of (full) employment

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that aired Monday, August 4, 2025. Click here to listen to the segment, recorded Friday, 8/1, before the announcement of change in leadership at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists talk lots about labor-market conditions in the macroeconomy. And to do so, they use lots of […]

bounded optimism

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that airs on Monday, July 7, 2025. Click here to listen to the segment. When asked about her third album, released May 2024 and titled, Radical Optimism, pop-star Dua Lipa remarked, in part, “I want to just move on and grow…every experience is a lesson.” Economists […]

symbiosis

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that aired on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Click here to listen to the show, which begins at 23:40. The debate about trade policy—and specifically, the imposition of across-the-board tariffs for whatever reason—often overlooks the symbiotic relationship between U.S. trade deficits and the U.S. dollar as the […]

scale matters

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that airs Monday, April 7. Click here to listen to the segment, which begins at 1 minute into In the Moment. The U.S. economy is big—like, really big. Consider, for example, Figure 1, in which I illustrate nominal GDP, which measures the market value of all […]

they might be giants

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that aired Wednesday, January 8. Click here to listen; the segment begins the SDPB program, In the Moment. Last weekend, I visited San Francisco to attend the annual three-day meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA), which meets in conjunction with 66 associations in allied disciplines known […]

the inflation fallacy

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that airs on Monday, July 1, 2024. Click here to listen to the show. For more macroeconomic analysis, follow J. M. Santos on Twitter @NSMEdirector. For the last Monday Macro segment, I sat down with SDPB’s Lori Walsh to discuss the seeming disconnect between the relatively […]

resolutions

This blog post accompanies the SDPB Monday Macro segment that airs on Tuesday, January 2, 2024. Click here to listen to the segment. For more macroeconomic analysis, follow J. M. Santos on Twitter @NSMEdirector. In the September 19, 1966 issue of Newsweek, Nobel laureate American economist Paul Samuelson quipped, “Wall Street indexes predicted nine out […]