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Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Why more really is more

Thumbnail : 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, […]

Unfinished business (2): European banks

Thumbnail : 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 […]

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