This is a nice post from Dani Rodrik. The short answer is it depends. Free trade increases the price of export goods and lowers the price of imports: [A]nyone who understands comparative advantage knows that free trade affects relative prices, not the price level (the latter being the province of macro and monetary factors). When […]
Read more...This is four years too late, but for those readers (particularly those outside the US) who wonder how Americans were conned into believing going into Iraq was warranted and desirable, watch this video (or read the transcript). The Bush Administration disinformation wouldn’t have worked if the press had exhibited any backbone. This documentary goes through […]
Read more...The Financial Times, in a series of articles published today, probes the workings of the carbon trading business, and uncovers widespread fraud: buyers paying for reductions that don’t occur, organizations extracting large carbon reduction payments for programs they were going to implement regardless, clueless or complicit brokers, offset programs that are shams. We have been […]
Read more...Count on the Financial Times to make a clear, compelling argument. From its editorial “CO2 needs a price but taxes are the best way to set it:“ The Kyoto protocol to fight climate change expires in 2012. The shape of a successor treaty is still in doubt, but one aspect seems certain: carbon trading will […]
Read more...There is quiet distress within the Democratic Party that the need to rein in the burgeoning Bush deficits will severely limit their ability to tackle issues near and dear to their heart, such as health care. As Mark Thoma reports in “Democrats and Deficits,” citing Brad Plumer of the New Republic and Greg Anrig, Nobel […]
Read more...The Financial Times has managed to be too polite. A more accurate title for this story would be “United States Again Refuses to Commit to Anything Regarding Global Warming.” Now this continuation of the US head-in-the-sand posture might be fine if the Administration hadn’t raised expectations by agreeing to a climate change summit. So its […]
Read more...This post comes from a Frank de Libero, reader at Angry Bear. By way of background, not only are some of the main writers at Angry Bear pretty serious statisticians, but they attract them as readers, and Libero appears to be one. Libero does a quick and dirty analysis of employment versus various ways to […]
Read more...Oddly, there hasn’t been as much chatter in the blogsphere as I would have expected on the House passage on Friday of what is called the “say on pay” bill. The House legislation would give shareholders a non-binding vote on executive pay and golden parachutes. Initially, the Senate wasn’t expected to take it up, but […]
Read more...Earlier this week, Britan convened a UN Security Council meeting on the issue of global warming, both to galvanize opinion and to discuss the threat it represented to the stability of member nations. The session instead exposed rifts between the first and third world, with developing countries led by China very much opposed to interference. […]
Read more...One can debate whether and how much aid subprime borrowers deserve, but a pair of articles Wednesday illustrates how difficult it will be to come up with any form of relief. In an underreported story, the FDIC hosted a session that included banking and mortgage industry leaders, legislators, investment bankers, and representatives from the SEC, […]
Read more...The failure of the Democrats to win authority for Medicare to negotiate drug prices is an inexcusable defeat. Anyone who is even modestly up on this issue knows that the scary problem with burgeoning entitlements isn’t Social Security, it’s Medicare, and Medicare is out of control because our whole health system is run for the […]
Read more...Mark Thoma has a good post about the discussion on Hamilton Project director Jason Furman’s health care proposal, which in a nutshell argues that the way to lower health care costs is to have consumers bear more of the costs. That’s the thinking behind Health Care Savings accounts,but Furman tweaks the idea, deeming the original […]
Read more...While I am loath to look Financial-Times centric, there are days when it has a lot of good material, and today is one of those days. Gideon Rachman, in “Climate change is not a global crisis – that is the problem,” works through the implications of the fact that global warming will create winners and […]
Read more...I don’t know about you, but every time I hear about a book on leadership by an ex-CEO, I cringe. They are almost without exception self congratulatory puff pieces with plenty of macho posturing. And they seldom offer useful advice. For example, one reader gave a capsule review of Jack – Straight from the Gut: […]
Read more...William Greider was early to question whether free trade delivers the benefits its proponents assert it does (we pointed to his 2005 New York Times op-ed piece, “America’s Truth Deficit,” in which he described our prevailing regime as managed trade rather than free trade, and observed that most of our trading partners were playing the […]
Read more...