This paper provides the details of the construction of new quarterly measures of the real GDPs of the 36 U.S. trading partners that are taken into consideration by the Federal Reserve in its "broad exchange rate" indexes. These new measures have some important advantages. First, they allow the...

The long economic expansion was fueled by an unprecedented rise in private expenditure relative to income, financed by a growing flow of net credit to the private. On the surface, it seemed that the growing burden of the household sector's debt was counterbalanced by a spectacular rise in the...

With economic growth having cooled to 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007, the economy can ill afford a slump in consumption by the American household. But it now appears that the household sector could finally give in to the pressures of rising gasoline prices, a weakening home market, and...

As we projected in a previous strategic analysis, the U.S. economy experienced growth rates higher than 4 percent in 2004. The question we want to raise in this strategic analysis is whether these rates will persist or come back down. We believe that several signs point in the latter direction....

In its November 2007 Strategic Analysis, the Levy Institute's Macro-Modeling Team called for an immediate, sustained fiscal stimulus of 2 percent of GDP, as well as a plan for a much larger additional fiscal stimulus should the economic slowdown continue over the next two to three years. Since...

This paper presents the main features of the macroeconomic model being used at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, which has proven to be a useful tool in tracking the current financial and economic crisis. We investigate the connections of the model to the "New Cambridge" approach,...