Author Archives: admin

Just heard Simon Johnson at the IMF conference on Iceland (webcast). He’s (still) very worried about overleveraged financial institutions and especially about the euromess. I’ll have a lot more to say on the latter in an upcoming post. For now, I just wanted to report the terrifying proclamation of Johnson. Paraphrase: ‘The European banking system […]

Paul Krugman … then you might be pretty confused about what’s happening to our world, economically. I recently finished a mid-career break to study globalization. When I started — 2005 — I wanted to explore something which was the common question among clients:  ‘Where is globalization heading?’  Rather than reply with an uninformed hunch, I […]

Note: The left panel is 1997, the right panel is 2009. I’ve been reading the Macroeconomic Review of Singapore’s central bank (the new edition will be published in October), from which the above ‘heat maps’ are lifted. Read down the Y-axis for the exporting country, and the X-axis for the importer. China is still a […]

The current recession has brought to the fore two key schools of thought regarding economic policy, in a rehearsal of earlier and probably ageless debates. One school is Keynesian and the other can be called an ‘Austrian’ viewpoint because many of its founding figures in fact studied and theorized in pre-war Austria. The main purpose […]

Consider the travails of the euro-area in terms of the macroeconomic policy trilemma (1/). Here is the framework: i. Balance of payments trouble when external credit dries up (sudden stop) ==> solvency threat via banking system and sovereign debt via lender-of-last-resort / contingent debt. ii. Maintenance of the existing monetary order (the system of irrevocably […]

As a macro framework for analysis, consider the travails of the euro-area in terms of the macroeconomic policy trilemma (1/). Here is the framework: i. Balance of payments trouble when external credit dries up (sudden stop) ==> solvency threat via banking system and sovereign debt via lender-of-last-resort / contingent debt. ii. Maintenance of the existing […]

The website is http://intelligencesquaredus.org/. Nouriel Roubini comes out very well in this. Thank God he is on this panel. Laura Tyson engages with the supply-siders on their own terms — “the government must balance its books, just like households do” (I am paraphrasing). The job of a well-trained and well-historied economist is to explain exactly the falsity […]

Greece Ireland Italy Portugal Spain Inflation (HICP)Feb 2011 4.2 0.9 2.1 3.5 3.4 Labour costs2010q4 -6.6 -3.1 1.8 4.2* -0.8 REER (BIS)Jan 2011 -0.8 -5.9 -4.5 -1.5 -2.6 sources: Eurostat; national authorities. all figures are percent y/y* 2011q1. Note:euro (vs usd) change Jan2011/Jan2010 is -4.0%.euro (NEER; BIS) change Jan2011/Jan2010 is -7.8%. Since this issue is […]

My article on the prospect of an unexpected Fed easing in 2011H2 is now available on the EIU ViewsWire.

My new article on QE is freely available from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Views Wire”: Central bank orthodoxy is under threat.