Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category
Excessive credit leads to crash… so expand credit again?
Martin Wolf in today’s Financial Times puts the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing”, as well as other countries’ monetary expansions, into perspective:
Monetary policy has worked, in practice, via credit expansion. It is, as a result, at least partly responsible for the debt crisis of today. Who can now confidently state that reliance on a policy which worked [...]
The truth about the Currency Wars
America should get its own economic house in order rather than blame the slump on China’s currency antics.
Read my spiked article in full here.
Currency wars on hold for now
Over the past few weeks we’ve heard lots of discussion about so-called “currency wars”. The US, in particular, has ratched up its rhetoric of complaint against the Chinese for not allowing the value of its currency, the yuan, to appreciate. Japan, Brazil and South Korea have also devalued their currencies in recent weeks.
It has often appeared that [...]
Wall Street 2: we’re all Gordon Gekkos now
In Oliver Stone’s sequel, released in British cinemas today, it’s no longer only the pinstriped bankers who are sinfully greedy – it’s all of us.
Read my spiked article in full here.
Republicans’ “Pledge to America”: lacking credibility, full of intensity
Last week House Republicans announced their “Pledge to America”, which promises to restrain government spending. But the fact is, despite all their puffed up rhetoric, Republicans lack credibility when it comes to deficit reduction.
Two useful articles published today make this point. First, Jacob Sullum in Reason argues that Republicans’ vows to restore more balance to the government accounts ”ring hollow”. The “Pledge [...]
The recession is over: time to move on
The National Bureau of Economic Research announced today that the recession officially ended in June 2009. Starting in December 2007, the 18-month period was the longest recession since the Second World War.
No big deal? Well, first of all, as Barry Ritholtz points out, the news from the NBER (with its accompanying evidence) puts paid to [...]
The truth about unemployment
In today’s Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein – an astute business journalist – asks us to move away from the facile and noisy debate about tax cuts, stimulus or government takeover of the economy, and instead to focus on structural economic issues.
Pearlstein gets right to the point: “The loss of eight million jobs reflects problems that are [...]
Alaska’s faux libertarian economics
At last, we have a legitimate criticism of Sarah Palin and her fellow Republicans in Alaska. But it’s worth noting that Alaska is just an extreme case of the US economy’s dependence on state support.
In Thursday’s New York Times, Michael Powell wrote about how Republican politicians in Alaska have a contradictory relationship with the federal [...]
A tale of two recessions?
David Leonhardt’s article in today’s New York Times paints a picture of diverging fortunes in our “Great Recession”: some groups (a minority) are doing very badly, while the majority remain employed and are in fact benefiting from gains in purchasing power.
He notes that, to a greater extent than in previous downturns, those made unemployed have remained jobless for longer: ”Almost 45 percent of today’s [...]
Phelps on innovation
In an interesting op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times, Edmund Phelps, the Nobel-prize winning economist at Columbia University, called for a “focus on fixing the structural problems, that, unresolved, will stymie the economy over the long haul”. It is defintely worth reading.
Like many economists, Phelps criticizes Keynesian ideas about insufficient demand. But unlike many other critics [...]