One of the funny things about slow motion train wrecks in the financial arena is that even when they are painfully obvious, they can be so long in coming that the Cassandras come to look like idiots, or worse, throw in the towel. Remember the dot com era. Anyone with an iota of common sense […]
Read more...We predicted, given China’s blistering response to America’s imposition of countervailing duties on coated paper manufacturers (a small amount of goods, but a big shot across the bow) and its aggressive posture in the negotiation of the language of the third IPCC report, that Paulson’s efforts to obtain trade concessions and a revaluation of the […]
Read more...That won’t go anywhere as a horror flick title, but the specter of China’s ever growing trade surpluses is focusing the mind of its trading partners. Some hoped that these surpluses would correct themselves naturally over time as the Chinese population started consuming more and its economy became less dependent on exports. That clearly isn’t […]
Read more...Mark Thoma pointed us to an insightful Washington Post op-ed piece, “China’s Trade Time Bomb,” by Robert Samuelson. He makes the point that trade with China isn’t yet having much impact on the US economy, but soon will be, mainly because they don’t play fair (something we’ve commented on before): It sometimes seems as if […]
Read more...Readers may have taken note about the robust debate among Serious Economists about free trade, provoked in large measure by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik holding some of his peers’ feet to the fire (note that Rodrik is not anti-free trade, but anti sloppy or dumbed down justifications). One continuing bone of contention between economists and […]
Read more...The third installment of this year’s series of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’ reports is due out Friday. Each successive report becomes more and more politicized, with the upshot that they are less and less valid as scientific pronouncements. China is the heavy in the effort to water down and distort the findings, […]
Read more...Interestingly, after a some robust debate among Serious Economists at Mark Thoma’s blog, Economist’s View, on the merits of trade (even Krugman contributed via e-mail), a study taking the opposite view appears at Economic Policy Institute. The study argues that millions of jobs have been lost to China. Its methodology looks reasonable. Mark Thoma was […]
Read more...It seems China is becoming the pivotal player on many fronts. Apologies for being a day late on this story, but we could not access it on the Financial Times website and had to have the text e-mailed. As we have noted before, the proliferation of fuel technologies is slowing widespread adoption of cleaner cars. […]
Read more...Earlier this week, Britan convened a UN Security Council meeting on the issue of global warming, both to galvanize opinion and to discuss the threat it represented to the stability of member nations. The session instead exposed rifts between the first and third world, with developing countries led by China very much opposed to interference. […]
Read more...A provocative article by Jeff Faux at the Economic Policy Institute argues that US trade deficits have become so large and so chronic that we need to put the brakes on further trade liberalization until we get our house in order. And getting our house in order means increasing our domestic savings rate. For those […]
Read more...We got this map from Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, which in turn cites Kottke. In case you had any doubts as to who was the leading outlet for China, Inc., now you know (although some question the methodology, based on my discussions with people who have knowledge of Wal-Mart’s buying practices, I have no doubt […]
Read more...We have yet another instance of the Journal putting a happier face on the news than the Financial Times, this time on the slowly escalating US-China trade dispute. By way of background, we reported earlier on the US’s imposition of punitive duties on Chinese, Indonesian, and South Korean coated paper because these countries were determined […]
Read more...I have long regarded chartism and technical analysis as tantamount to astrology. At the same time, I do know of at least one trader who has made a fortune trading that way (but he professes he waits for multiple, pronounced signals, and makes fewer than 10 trades a year). So I take this chart, from […]
Read more...Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined an alliance as, “When two thieves have their hands so deeply plunged into each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third party.” We seem to be in that position with China. The problem is that we’d like to renegotiate our “alliance,” but we are trying to […]
Read more...Many observers overlooked the fact that increases in bank reserve ratios in China and India, which reduce liquidity by curtailing how much banks can gear their equity (and banks are much more important financial players in those markets than in the US) plus a teeny interest rate increase in Japan set the stage for the […]
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