The UK's double dip?

Much ado was made last week about a second straight quarter of contracting GDP in the United Kingdom, and Paul Krugman's blog pointed in the direction of a helpful writeup by the UK statistical office. Krugman reprints their shocking graphic showing the rebound is more sluggish than was the UK's emergence from the Great Depression. Frightening stuff, but the UK was also relatively less battered by the Depression than the U.S.

Coin shortage in Zimbabwe

A few days ago, the Times updated us on the monetary situation in Zimbabwe, where coins are in short supply in that dollarized economy.

Krugman berates Bernanke

This weekend's upcoming Times Magazine includes an excerpt of Paul Krugman's forthcoming book, End This Depression Now, in which he criticizes the Fed's recent monetary policy as too timid, and in particular too timid relative to the implications of Ben Bernanke's research prior to joining the Fed.

This week I showed the Q&A's from Bernanke's March 2012 lectures at GWU in my intermediate macro class at Queens College.  What stands out now that Krugman's raised this point, that Bernanke appears to have significantly moderated his views on Fed activism, is a mildly reverential invocation of Paul Volcker's and Alan Greenspan's commitments to price stability in the 1980s and 1990s, which appears toward the end of lecture 2. It reminds me of Paul Volcker's hawkish op-ed last fall, which I mentioned here.

VA is asked by vets to look ahead

Here's an NPR article about bottlenecks in mental health service provision for veterans. It quotes Patrick Bellon, an activist with Veterans for Common Sense: "You don't see the real cost in human terms until 20 to 30 years after the conflict has ended," Bellon says. "Only recently have we seen an attempt to increase resources to deal with that cost."

It's nice to see this sound bite fact referenced again, mirroring VA Secretary Shinseki's similar statement a few weeks back. We put it in our Institute of Medicine report in 2010.

VA looks ahead

An article in the Times about expanding VA hiring quotes VA chief Eric Shinseki: "History shows that the costs of war will continue to grow for a decade or more after the operational missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended.... As more veterans return home, we must ensure that all veterans have access to quality mental health care."

Sometimes a null result is publishable!

The Times reports on several studies about obesity by Roland Sturm and others that find no relationship between the availability of healthy foods in neighborhoods (e.g., grocery stores) and child and adolescent obesity.  I've heard it said that near subway stops in New York, junk food is easier to find than healthy food, a characteristic that I doubt is easy to measure well in large-scale studies.

Reverse migration

The Times also reports on outmigration of highly skilled foreign born (or second-generation immigrant American citizens). No doubt these anecdotes are fueled in part by continued macroeconomic weakness and credit market impediments here in the U.S.