Do you remember “Whip Inflation Now,” Gerald Forf’s program to reduce inflation by exhorting consumers to spend less? WIN buttons, part of a public awareness campaign, quickly came to symbolize the cluelessness of the Ford Administration. The Chinese are about to learn Ford’s lesson the hard way. Rampaging domestic inflation has led the government to […]
Read more...The Treasury department has been struggling to persuade China to let the yuan appreciate (the Chinese now engage in a dirty float in place of their former hard peg). Congress has threatened to impose trade sanctions if the Chinese do not let their currency float. However, the Chinese do not take kindly to threats, and […]
Read more...We’ve never understood why regulation has such a bad name in America. Yes, there are all kinds of terrible specific implementations of the concept “regulation.” But the difficulty of getting it right doesn’t mean the concept should be rejected out of hand, since it turns out the alternative of “no regulation” isn’t so hot. And […]
Read more...This story, on the Chinese successfully making a cyber attack on the Pentagon, is admittedly a bit wide of the subject matter of this blog, but it’s a major story that the Financial Times seems to have broken. I don’t see it on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN or Bloomberg sites. Bizarrely, […]
Read more...One of the Treasury Department’s big campaigns has been to put pressure on the Chinese to allow the yuan to float more freely (the Chinese now engage in a dirty float in place of their former hard peg). Most analyses of the value of the yuan show it to be undervalued, some by as much […]
Read more...An excellent story, “China’s iClone,” in Popular Science on the Chinese cloning industry, which uses the miniOne, an iPhone clone that runs on Linux and offers improvements such as the ability to run on any phone network and a replaceable battery, at about half the price of the iPhone, as a point of departure. What […]
Read more...Back at my desk after over two weeks of holiday and wanted to get at least one post out before responding to some comments that seemed to call for a reply and getting back in touch with news and commentary. The Asian Development Bank issued a report that found that income inequality is on the […]
Read more...My Japanese friends have often said that China has a 5,000 year history of not living up to its potential. When I’ve passed that view along to Westerners, they’ve scoffed, viewing the Chinese juggernaut to be unstoppable. The Japanese may yet be proven correct. This post at Gristmill points to an article by Christina Larson […]
Read more...Has the Murdoch era already begun? Two days in a row we have had page one stories in the Wall Street Journal that managed to skew the facts. Today’s piece, “Foreign Investors Face New Hurdles Across the Globe,” is misleading in a minor and a major way. The minor way is likely to be apparent […]
Read more...The Bear Stearns/CDO drama has taken attention away from other worrisome conditions in the economy, and the biggest one is “global imbalances,” which is shorthand for the US running continuing, large current account deficits that are financed for the most part by foreign central banks, particularly those of China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. We’ve lived […]
Read more...The concept that cheap imports result in job losses should be a no-brainer, but it is still greeted with considerable resistance in some circles. Let’s be clear on a few points: while open trade in theory creates benefits to all parties, the system we have isn’t open trade, but managed trade. Most other countries negotiate […]
Read more...Felix Salmon commented on an intriguing and colorful post by Steve Waldman that argues that it’s in China’s best interest to buy a few CDOs and save the Street and the hedge fund industry from a meltdown and possible jail time. Here is the meat of Waldman’s argument: Here’s where the dragon comes in. Several […]
Read more...This is one of those days when there is quite a lot of good material, so forgive me for being brief. The Financial Times, on its editorial page, issued a warning to the US about getting chippy with the Chinese about the value of its currency. It did not stress some of the reasons argued […]
Read more...Below is an excellent post by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, at the new blog VoxEU. The post posits that the biggest risk to Asia is an asset crash, and looks at America’s experience during its industrializing phase to see what lessons might be learned. He determines that whether […]
Read more...I figure readers would like to hear good news now and again. From PhysOrg: In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, three cubs are seen near their mother at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province. (AP) — Eighty-four Siberian tigers, among the world’s rarest animals, have been […]
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