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 […]
Read more...The US has spent considerable time and energy hectoring the Chinese about the artificially low value of its currency (although there is considerable disagreement among experts as to how undervalued it really is). The notion that the currency is the chief culprit has become so fixed in the public imagination that Congress is determined to […]
Read more...Larry Summers keeps getting better and better as an op-ed writer. His current article in the Financial Times lays out a series of practical recommendations on what to do about climate change. He focuses on the problem of the developing world, since they will account for 75% of the increase in greenhouse gases, and as […]
Read more...I’m a bit late to get to this item, a predictably good article by the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf on Nouriel Roubini’s observations about why Asian countries became so willing to finance our deficits (short answer: they decided to keep their currencies cheap after the 1997 emerging markets crisis) and whether this situation is sustainable […]
Read more...Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz can be blunt. In an interview with MarketWatch, he says that our dependence on Chinese capital puts us in a not-so-great bargaining position. He also pointed out in Congressional testimony that the Chinese have no reason to open their financial markets since they don’t need capital. And our focus […]
Read more...One of the funny things about slow motion train wrecks in the financial arena is that even when they are painfully obvious, they can be so long in coming that the Cassandras come to look like idiots, or worse, throw in the towel. Remember the dot com era. Anyone with an iota of common sense […]
Read more...We predicted, given China’s blistering response to America’s imposition of countervailing duties on coated paper manufacturers (a small amount of goods, but a big shot across the bow) and its aggressive posture in the negotiation of the language of the third IPCC report, that Paulson’s efforts to obtain trade concessions and a revaluation of the […]
Read more...That won’t go anywhere as a horror flick title, but the specter of China’s ever growing trade surpluses is focusing the mind of its trading partners. Some hoped that these surpluses would correct themselves naturally over time as the Chinese population started consuming more and its economy became less dependent on exports. That clearly isn’t […]
Read more...Mark Thoma pointed us to an insightful Washington Post op-ed piece, “China’s Trade Time Bomb,” by Robert Samuelson. He makes the point that trade with China isn’t yet having much impact on the US economy, but soon will be, mainly because they don’t play fair (something we’ve commented on before): It sometimes seems as if […]
Read more...Readers may have taken note about the robust debate among Serious Economists about free trade, provoked in large measure by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik holding some of his peers’ feet to the fire (note that Rodrik is not anti-free trade, but anti sloppy or dumbed down justifications). One continuing bone of contention between economists and […]
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