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Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

Visualizing the shadow banking system

Thumbnail : 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

Thumbnail : 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

Thumbnail : <i>Wall Street 2:</i> 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 […]

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