It's frustrating that we have no real idea of what this deal involves. But that's not surprising, given that the FT says "the deal was pulled together in a slapdash manner during a 70-minute meeting between Japan’s chief negotiator Ryosei Akazawa and Trump."

Brian Albrecht on Michael Pettis:

Summary of the most important supply-oriented parts of the bill, including directing HUD to produce best practice zoning guidelines, streamlining environmental review, grants for places adopting pro-housing policies, manufactured housing reforms, and loan policy for multifamily.

A true genius, and an American original. RIP. "Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97" nytimes.com/2025/07/27/art…

CHAOTIC energy coming from the table notes today

I'm planning a small US seminar tour in mid-November. My work covers my travel expenses, so I'm easy on your seminar budget. Invite me if you're interested in hearing about rationing in sticky price models!

Poll inspired by Evan Soltas discussion at #NBERSI on Thursday: "In a model with Frechet-distributed idiosyncratic preferences, average utility conditional on choice of location is equal across locations. This is a property of the distribution, not spatial equilibrium."

Given the almost even split in this poll, it looks like Evan was wise to spend a few minutes on Thursday pointing out a peculiar features of T1EV distributions:

The IMF October Outlook report for Europe had this stunning graph. Every single office in the European Commission should have a print-out of this figure on the wall. Every working day should be spent on it. That is the best response to US trade policy. imf.org/en/Publication…

Breaking: New Trump Executive Order ends de minimis shipping from any country in the world effective August 29th, 2025.

Starring role for Luis E. Quintero in this piece:

Erika McEntarfer has devoted her career to public service. She has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased. By incorrectly asserting that the data are biased, President Trump is undermining

Mad about jobs report inaccuracy? One reason it has gotten harder in recent years is declining survey response rates. There was an unpaid advisory group of statistical experts that was working on solving that problem at its last meeting... before Howard Lutnick disbanded it.🧵

“The simple test is whether an economist's views tend to diverge from those of his ideological allies when the ideology clashes with the economics. If they do he is a real economist. If they do not, he is only an economist in working hours.” daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/economic-met…

BLS's first-release estimates of nonfarm payroll employment have gotten more, not less, accurate over time.

Also, how does this help Trump’s other objectives, such as reducing trade deficits? Someone should tell the president that selling higher education to international students is one of our most successful exports washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/…

Lake and Liu's "Local Labor Market Effects of the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs": "The tariffs did not boost local steel employment but substantially depressed local employment in steel-consuming industries for many years after Bush removed the tariffs." aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

Recently accepted to #REStud, "Homeownership, Polarization, and Inequality," from Andrii Parkhomenko: restud.com/homeownership-… #EconTwitter

Great new paper on LLM benchmark for taxes, linked below. But first, IRS is insane. 1: marginal rates on the IRS website. 2: Opus 4 calc (correct!). 3: turns out the *right* tax owed is NOT those % figures, but a tax look up table that is roughly, but not exactly, the same. Wtf?

“as of 4 April, beer cans were added to the list of aluminium derivative products subject to specific tariffs. This means that the aluminium content of the beer is subject to an additional tariff, typically 50 per cent.” ft.com/content/3b6b0e…