Recently added articles from The International Economy:
What fiscal stimulus?(OFF THE NEWS)
Jan 01, 2009; Nakamae, T. ... The notion of fiscal stimuli in Japan during the 1990s is somewhat misleading. It is not so much that government spending was ineffective, but rather that it never actually existed, or at least not to the extent touted by the government. After the bursting of Japan's economic bubble, ...
Singapore coffee klatch.(Off the News)
Jan 01, 2009 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sometimes a picture tells the story as well as a thousand words. The image above, produced using a combination of Google Earth and a plugin from Vesseltracker.com, shows an unprecedented number of container ships sitting idle off Singapore in March. The ...
"Your Fall 2008 issue did a fantastic job of assessing and evaluating what has transpired in recent months in the global economy.(Off the News)
Jan 01, 2009; Yeutter, Clayton ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Your Fall 2008 issue did a fantastic I job of assessing and evaluating what has transpired in recent months in ...
From Newsweek columnist Dan Gross's hot new E-book.(Off the News)
Jan 01, 2009 ... From Newsweek Columnist Dan Gross's Hot New E-book: "In fact, it was now clear that because of the way the system was designed, losses and failures could only create massive, widely distributed losses. The disaster was not a bug, but an inevitable feature of the financial ...
How we got into this mess: a political primer.(FROM THE FOUNDER)
Jan 01, 2009; Smick, David M. ... The April 2 G20 meeting in London of the major world economic leaders could have been the most important global economic gathering since 1944, when the Bretton Woods conference reshaped the old order near the end of World War II. But it wasn't. Another Bretton Woods ...
Lax governance and poor supervision.(The Monetary Realist)
Jan 01, 2009; Posen, Adam S. ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the current atmosphere, one could be forgiven for thinking that the current financial meltdown was due to a technical engineering problem, or at least that the U.S. Treasury thinks so. The complex proposals Treasury recently put forward--for stress ...
Those uppity peasant workers: the end of the era of cheap Chinese labor.
Jan 01, 2009; Gong, Sasha ... On a warm day in November 2004, I visited a shoe factory in Guangdong Province. Earlier that year, a riot had broken out in that factory of eight thousand employees. Thousands of workers had stormed the shop floor and the offices, smashing equipment, vehicles, cooking utensils, and ...
How much will China grow? China, the world's largest surplus country and one of the world's most export-dependent economies, faces great uncertainty about its outlook amidst the current crisis. Over forty experts offer their predictions for China's 2009 GDP growth rate.
Jan 01, 2009 ... I. Not by much--less than 2 percent: The consumption pattern of Chinese households does not correspond to the output that China's export industries produce. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] DESMOND LACHMAN Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute ...
Solidifying a new G2: China and the United States should stabilize the yuan/dollar relationship.
Jan 01, 2009; McKinnon, Ronald I. ... Tensions between the United States and China escalated recently when the new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, suggested in mid-January that China might be designated as a "currency manipulator." This prompted Premier Wen Jiabao on January 29 to mount a vigorous defense of ...
Replacing Humpty Dumpty: the new role of central bank credit targets.
Jan 01, 2009 ... Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009). George A. Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland St. Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was awarded ...
If Barack Obama could achieve only one financial reform, what it should it be?(A SYMPOSIUM OF VIEWS)
Jan 01, 2009 ... It is often said that new American presidents who attempt to achieve too many goals overnight usually fail--that they need instead to spend their political capital on confronting initially a relatively small number of issues. Eventually, they can broaden their agenda. If President Obama ...
End too-big-to-fail.
Jan 01, 2009; Meltzer, Allan H. ... The Obama Treasury Department is stuck in the same place as the Bush Treasury. It cannot find a way to value the many mortgages that banks and financial institutions hold. The result is delay and lengthening the financial crisis. The solution stares at them, but they are either ...
A financial stability board: cutting the Gordian Knot of U.S. financial regulation.
Jan 01, 2009; Taylor, Charles R. ... A single macro-prudential regulator should have responsibility for the stability for any national financial sector. This is the emerging consensus in the United States and in other industrial countries. The buck, so to speak, has to stop somewhere. What should this regulatory ...
Does the world need a financial Manhattan Project?
Jan 01, 2009; Smick, D. ... Excerpt from The Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, 2009). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the early 1940s, the world's best scientific minds took on the challenge of preempting Adolf Hitler 's plans for a nuclear weapon ....
A new financial architecture: the Issing Committee corralled some of the best minds in banking and financial supervision. Here's what they concluded.
Jan 01, 2009 ... In an environment of inadequate regulation and gaps in supervisory oversight, inappropriate incentive structures have encouraged the production of complex financial instruments supported by high degrees of leverage. The situation in booming financial markets became more and more ...
Recipe for financial order: a rule-based system for future prosperity.
Jan 01, 2009; Siebert, Horst ... We are in a crisis which has two faces: a severe disruption of the financial industry and a stark recession. How do we get out of this situation? For the long run, we need a reliable institutional arrangement that will prevent getting into a similar financial distress again. In the short ...
The euro's deficiencies: out of crisis can come a change in the European Union's balance of power.
Jan 01, 2009; Soros, George ... The euro suffers from structural deficiencies. It has a central bank, but it does not have a central treasury, and the supervision of the banking system is left to national authorities. These defects are increasingly making their influence felt, aggravating the financial crisis. ...
New rules of the road: a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S. European struggle over financial regulation.
Jan 01, 2009; Engelen, Klaus C. ... President Barack Obama gave some encouraging signals ahead of the second Group of Twenty financial summit in London on April 2. Ahead of this meeting to begin repairing the shattered global financial system, he said, "We can no longer sustain twenty-first century markets with ...
Duisenberg's lesson for the ECB: stop worrying about the financial markets.
Jan 01, 2009; Krauss, Melvyn ... It is almost two months now that the European Central Bank ruled out the possibility that eurozone interest rates would be going to zero. Then, that possibility was hedged at the last meeting of the ECB's Governing Council. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Who knows what will ...
Revisiting the 1930s: a pandemic of preferential trade agreements is undermining free trade.
Jan 01, 2009 ... An excerpt from Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Trading Agreements Undermine Free Trade by Jagdish Bhagwati (Oxford University Press, 2008). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As we contemplate the proliferation of Preferential Trade Agreements ...
