Our public spending cuts, in the pipeline since July, have been announced. Here’s some background on the structure of public finance in the UK. Salient points: Public spending is divided into two: current spending on running costs of government, such as salaries and equipment; and capital spending on new roads, railways, bridges and schools. In […]
Read more...By Yiping Huang, Professor of Economics at the China Center for Economic Research, Peking University. Cross-posted from VoxEU. On 19 October, the People’s Bank of China announced a series of rate hikes. This column argues that the moves were aimed at combating domestic inflation and avoiding the mistakes of Japan in the 1980s. On 19 […]
Read more...By Jim Quinn, who writes at The Burning Platform As I listen to pundits, politicians and populists expound on the jobs situation in our country day after day, as if they knew what they were talking about, I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George quits his job as a real estate agent. He sits […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. Even prior to the financial crisis of 2007, economists and policymakers actively debated whether central banks should use interest […]
Read more...The comment by Joseph Stiglitz in the Financial Times lambasting the Fed’s expected move to quantitative easing is certain to have no impact on the central bank’s course of action. His article nevertheless is proof that this idea is not as well received as the officialdom would like you to believe. It isn’t merely Stiglitz’s […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das a risk consultant and the author of the Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives During the European debt crisis, in a matter of days, the dollar strengthened by around 10%. The weakness of the Euro and resultant appreciation of the Renminbi by over 14% reduced […]
Read more...Bloomberg reported on a rather peculiar announcement from the Chinese officialdom, which comes off as a rather lame rationalization of its ban on rare earths exports. If you are late to this cause celebre, rare earths confusingly really aren’t rare, but they are found only in fairly low concentrations and are nasty to mine. They […]
Read more...A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal, reporting on a conference at the Boston Fed, indicates that some people at the Fed may recognize that the central bank has boxed itself in more than a tad. The first is on the question of whether the Fed is in a liquidity trap. A lot […]
Read more...One of Winston Churchill’s oft repeated saying was, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Of late, China has become a Russian-level conundrum to the wider world. Developed economies are troubled by Middle Kingdom’s increasingly aggressive economic stance; neighboring countries are rattled […]
Read more...After the in retrospect not that terrible first acute phase of the financial crisis, August-September 2007, this blog began taking note of Extreme Measures. These were proposals by respectable people for dealing with the burgeoning mess that were usually very creative and had zero chance of happening. The fact that so many normally sound people […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager who writes for New Deal 2.0 Although I have consistently taken the line that QE is totally useless, in effect an accounting trick which does little for real economic activity, I should have at least acknowledged its powers in terms of fomenting casino-like speculation in […]
Read more...Hhm, is there any use of data that won’t in the end interest Google? The idea of using price information on websites as a way of developing an inflation index is clever, but I wonder how they will deal with the issues that bedevil statisticians, like discounting (I can tell a gym in my area […]
Read more...A DC contact warned me last week that the banks were readying a massive pushback on the foreclosure crisis. It went into full swing over the weekend. Obama, admittedly through his proxy, David Axelrod, threw his weight in behind the banks on Face The Nation: Q: I guess the first question I would have is […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 9, 2008 The question above may seem foolish. Oil has just passed $124 a barrel despite improvement in the dollar. Commodities prices are moving less in lockstep than before (gold and wheat in particular have backed off significantly from their highs) suggesting that buying is not the result of […]
Read more...Yves here. I did a small study for a then midlevel, now top level Russian oligarch in the early 1990s who bought a US retail chain. It wasn’t exactly the most astute purchase. One of the factoids I came across in assisting him in figuring out how to scrub it up for resale was the […]
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