Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category
GM’s IPO: not a return to former glory
General Motors went public again last week, raising $23 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) – the country’s largest ever. The US government’s ownership stake was halved as a result. The successful offering appeared to vindicate the Obama administration’s decision to bail out the struggling automaker in early 2009. For many of those who support free markets […]
Visualizing the shadow banking system
This chart is a roadmap of “The Shadow Banking System”. It was created by economists at the New York Federal Reserve, and I learned about it from an article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. My picture of the map is hard to read here, but it does convey how complicated finance has become. The top […]
Brooks’ “liberals hard, conservatives soft”: a false dichotomy
In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about “the two cultures” he observes: Most of the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know are liberal, so it seems strange that American liberalism should adopt an economic philosophy that excludes psychology, emotion and morality. Yet that is what has happened. The economic approach embraced by […]
G-20 in Seoul: real conflict, but not a return to the 1930s
Conferences like last week’s G-20 gathering usually produce bland communiques and not much change. But the Seoul summit took this to an extreme: it involved real conflict which the final statement could barely conceal. As I recently described in spiked (here), the ostensible issue has to do with currencies and monetary policy, particularly between the austerity/trade […]
Katz: Why we need city-based manufacturing investment
(Video) Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution puts the case for manufacturing and innovation, based around strong metropolitan centers.
Buffalo: New York’s Midwest city
This video about Buffalo, produced by tourist and preservation groups, is quite impressive and reminded me of a few broader issues. First, we often forget that New York State encompasses what we know as the Midwest. In his New York Times op-ed yesterday, David Brooks argues that the trajectory of American politics is being determined by the working class of the Midwest: If Balzac […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.