Jonathan A. Parker
@ProfJAParker
Economist. See my MIT webpage to verify that this is me. Evidence-based economics and finance and humor. I do not endorse any cryptocurrency investment.
This is the argument against Trumpery, nicely put
Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen: The Fed Must Be Independent nytimes.com/2025/07/21/opi…
Fiscal incontinence in a picture (clipped from CRFB.org, projections from @USCBO)
“when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by a half-percent in September 2024, President Trump criticized …much too large. Then as soon as Trump was elected, when the Fed cut interest rates further in November and December, he criticized those cuts as much too small.”
Trying to Soften Up the Federal Reserve conversableeconomist.com/2025/07/22/try…
Wooah. Transparency push back against Trump widespread de-funding the police
My statement on the DC Circuit stay.
How did DOGE allow this wasteful advertising contract between the U.S. government and X?
Seeking Agents for our borders. Answer the call to serve with grit, valor, and honor. Join U.S. Border Patrol, earn up to $30,000. Apply now.
N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University, presented the 2025 Martin Feldstein Lecture on "The Fiscal Future." youtube.com/watch?v=B916t3…
Great, except that we have an insolvent state pension fund and, with the BBB Federal fiscal incontinence, I would prefer we pay off our debts rather than all raiding the state coffers for nice projects like this, even one designed to send used theatre to NYC for tourists.
Massachusetts has unveiled a live theater tax credit pilot program aimed at supporting musical and pre-Broadway productions. Read more from @EmilyHoll9: taxnotes.co/3TLMFga
Netanyahu and his coalition are etching their names alongside some pretty awful leaders in history . . .
There is enough food to feed every person in Gaza sitting in trucks in Egypt but the Israeli military will not let them in. This is a disgrace to Jewish tradition and what the Torah and Talmud say about just war.
The dataset behind this famous chart on the declining cost of genome sequencing has had its NIH funding cut. It tracked progress towards & beyond an ambitious goal ($1000 genome) that succeeded. Could any funders rescue the project? Sharing this would be very appreciated.
Przemek Jeziorski, who was a student in IO a year ahead of me at Stanford GSB econ, was murdered in Greece on July 4. He was a professor at Berkeley Haas in the marketing group. He was a kind, gifted person and his cheer was inimitable.
To be clear — this is a graph capturing mostly legal immigration, isn’t it? It omits all illegal border crossings. The Biden surge is a surge in legal immigration is somewhat (not at all completely) offset by a reduction in illegal immigration.
This chart puts recent ICE detentions (black) in historical perspective against the migration inflow on the Southwest land border (blue) in recent years. ICE detentions have certainly picked up, but they're tiny relative to the huge migrant inflow that happened in recent years.
Sometimes an import boom comes from high domestic demand, which leads to the important question: is Nauru is below its NAIRU?
China today released June trade data. Its exports to Nauru - the third smallest country in the world after the Vatican and Monaco - are up 6000% from a year ago. A symptom of how powerfully US tariffs are hitting China, pushing a flood of Chinese exports to everywhere else...
Cherry picking, but a sure way to goose returns is to not pay fees. Why do pension managers pay such high fees for a year of bad performance? Maybe because it’s not their money? Maybe because one asset manager skill is being more punishing than this tweet when they outperform?
If Chicago's pension funds were passively managed in 2024 (instead of spread across 80+ management firms), the city would have saved ~$40,000,000 in management fees. And returns would have been about 25% better.
Seems like you lack an education (Boston)
There are only four tier-1 cities in the 🇺🇸: New York (finance) DC (government) San Francisco (tech) LA (media & entertainment) No other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry.
Great thread here with cites to the research that backs it up . .
Question: What might be the employment effects of #tariffs? Answer: Potentially large ( 3 million lost jobs, unemployment to 5.6%) based on evidence from 18-19 US China trade war. @JeffHorwich and I wrote up a note building off a presentation I gave at the @MinneapolisFed
Very glad to be on the NBER SI Household Finance program this year. I presented a paper on private capital markets and inequality, joint with @cmtneztt and Ararat Gocmen. Presentation is here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=2t2Fqi… (starting 7:49:30), and a great discussion by Arthur Korteweg.
Fed Q&A on recent renovations. federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-…
“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” top CBS executives said in a statement announcing the news. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
On three separate occasions in the Oval Office today, Donald Trump attacked decisions he made during his first term, while forgetting he had been president before.
This. If we want to have the institutions of a less developed economy, we can be a less developed economy.
My candidate for the most worrying economic chart in the world right now: the proportion of CPI data that's now being calculated (ie estimated) by different cell imputation (ie proxy). We've gone from 10% to 35% in just a few months Wrote about it here: bloomberg.com/news/newslette…