Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category
Behavioralism leads to “monkeynomics”
Laurie Santos from Yale University in a TED talk that looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way primates make decisions. Santos says that her experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices humans make, monkeys make too.
It is bad enough that the financial crisis and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill [...]
Why more really is more
For centuries, economic growth and mass prosperity were understood to be highly desirable, yet today these social objectives are under siege. Daniel Ben-Ami’s new book is a clarion call to begin a counter-offensive.
Read my review of Ferraris for All: In Defence of Economic Progress, by Daniel Ben-Ami, in the spiked review of books, here.
Razing Detroit: nothing but flowers?
There are those who claim that we’ve experienced too much economic growth. There are those who complain about the impact of industrialization. And there are those who say there are too many people. But, if you want to see what a world of negative growth, deindustrialization and depopulation looks like, check out what is going on in [...]
China to let yuan rise, all the world’s economic problems solved
Or so you might think, based on what China’s critics have been claiming up until China’s latest announcement.
For nearly the past two years, China peg its currency, the yuan (also called the renminbi), to the US dollar. On Saturday the Chinese central bank revealed that it would end this policy.
Prior to this move, critics – [...]
Unfinished business (2): European banks
The latest quarterly review of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) compares today’s European sovereign debt crisis with the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The BIS understands the European crisis as similar to the early phase of the credit crunch, in 2007.
In a similar vein to the post below about US banks needing to restructure, the BIS notes [...]
Unfinished business (1): US banks
In a perceptive “Heard on the Street” column, the Wall Street Journal notes that credit continues to contract, despite government stimulus and Federal Reserve monetary expansion. The Journal says that a more thorough restructuring is needed if the US is to avoid a Japan-style “lost decade”.
Bank loans and leases have fallen by 10.5% since the end [...]
Roubini on financial reform
Here is Nouriel Roubini speaking recently about financial industry reform.
Reasonable, and goes further than the legislation currently being proposed. However, I think we need to be skeptical about how much good breaking up the large institutions will do for preventing another meltdown. As long as the productive economy is undynamic, finance will grow relatively; and as long [...]
Will eurozone crisis go global?
Interesting BBC discussion on the potential global implications of the eurozone crisis, with British economist Philippe Legrain, Italian politician Emma Bonino and Irwin Steltzer of the Hudson Institute.
I doubt if enlightened government action is enough to stop economic fallout from the necessary deleveraging. And beyond the short-term crisis, the only way to get over the negative impact of deleveraging is [...]
US economy’s artificial growth
James Bianco has an interesting post over at The Big Picture, entitled, “How much economic growth is ‘artificial’?” The answer: a lot.
Bianco highlights the findings from the recent Congressional Budget Office report, Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from January 2010 Through March 2010. He concludes that, [...]
Global exposure to European default
There’s more discussion of how the European sovereign debt crisis is global in scope.
Tony Barber of the Financial Times writes about a Royal Bank of Scotland report, published on Monday, that suggests that banks outside of southern Europe have much greater exposure than previously thought. RBS estimates that institutions outside of Greece, Portugal and Spain [...]