Bloomberg, getting a jump on next week’s news, tells us that expectations for the Commerce Department’s report on the US trade deficit, due on July 11, is that it got worse. In general, increasing current account deficits (of which trade is the biggest component) put downward pressure on currencies. But our nasty conundrum is that […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I’m normally a fan of Mohamed El-Erian, former head of Harvard Management, now co-president of bond giant Pimco. But his current comment in the Financial Times, “How best to manage global imbalances,” struck me as more than a tad disingenuous. Let’s go through the article: Whatever happened to the debate on global payments […]
Read more...A good paper at VoxEU reaches a conclusion that seems expected, yet has been contested in academic research, namely, that imports have lowered US inflation. As we have discussed in other posts, this has far more important policy implications than obvious at first blush. The Fed has been looking at inflation as strictly a domestic […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik often thinks more like a political economist (which was the initial focus of the dismal science) than the development economist he professes to be, which I consider to be a plus. That perspective enables him to frame issues in ways that sometimes escape other observers. Many discussions about economics often boil down to […]
Read more...Policymakers in Europe have been worried about the appreciation of the euro, which makes local goods less competitive in international markets. Another cost of the currency’s strength is that foreign direct investment has plummeted, as producers shift funds to nations that now have a cost advantage. From the Telegraph: Long-term private investors are pulling their […]
Read more...A good comment by Philip Stephens in the Financial Times, “Uncomfortable truths for a new world of them and us,” is a polite and understated wake-up call to the fading former imperialist of the West. He notes that the countries currently dominant in major international organizations assume that life will continue more or less as […]
Read more...I’m intrigued when a commentator gives high praise to a work by someone who comes from a political vantage different from his own. I get even more interested when another take on the same piece seems straight out of Rashomon, a radically different account with only a few facts in common. The opus in question […]
Read more...It’s hard to read the tea leaves of the European Union at such a remove, but a public show of disagreement, even if done politely, is not an everyday spectacle. Frances’ finance minister Christine Lagarde urged central bankers to alleviate currency misalignment. This is mainly code for “do something about the pricey euro” but is […]
Read more...Why is it that some ideas capture the popular imagination and others die on the vine? A lot has to do with timing, getting noticed by opinion leaders, having a pithy turn of phrase. Yet I’ve seen articles and books that (at least to me) make fundamentally important observations and go nowhere, and others which […]
Read more...What would we do without Brad Setser to give us a hard, analytical look at trade and international funds flows? Setser tells us that the headline news on the trade deficit, namely, that it shrank in March, is misleading. When you dig deeper, and in particular pull out petroleum-related flows, it reveals that real export […]
Read more...Sometimes I wonder if I am too critical of the punditocracy. But much should be expected of Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary and Harvard economics professor, yet many of his comment pieces in the Financial Times, which command considerable attention, appear to come up short. Consider his current offering “A strategy to promote healthy globalisation.” […]
Read more...Larry Summers, in “America needs to make a new case for trade,” worries, as do many others, about rising protectionist sentiments: In a world where Americans can legitimately doubt whether the success of the global economy is good for them, it will be In a world where Americans can legitimately doubt whether the success of […]
Read more...Alliance: When two thieves have their hands so deeply plunged into each others’ pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third party. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary The US and China bicker like an unhappily married couple, but Brad Setser warns us that the squabbling is getting nastier. And worse, both parties seem to fail […]
Read more...Carmen Reinhart has provided a synopsis of a paper she did with Kenneth Rogoff looking at financial crises over a longer time frame than most analyses, which have limited themselves to recent history (the economist’s version of the drunk looking under the street light for his keys because that’s where the light is good, as […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, commenting on a Wall Street Journal article that invoked, then tried to dismiss, concerns about resource scarcity, defended Malthus: Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era. Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th […]
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