Author Archives: admin

source: World Bank, IMF, open-thinking.com The 50 countries above have annual income per capita of USD 5000 or greater. Correlation does not equal causation. But there’s sure some intuitive sense here. On balance, why would the rich pay for the education of other people’s children? Sure, plenty of enlightened ones would know this is sensible. […]

The article appears to be freely available.

It’s the UK, Greece, Spain and Ireland that have withdrawn demand support from the EU27. GUKIS? Their combined imports from fellow EU27 economies at the top of the boom (2006) were 657 billion euros. In 2010, that figure is likely to be 546 billion euros, making a decline of 112 billion euros or 17%. Where […]

It’s been said that China’s economic development is a qualified ‘win’ for developing countries, particularly the poorest. That’s almost a stylized fact. I’d say it’s a ‘factual’ fact too. At least if the Pew Global Attitudes survey is anything to go by. As interesting as the slope of this relationship are the outliers. We can […]

Contributions to campaign committee and leadership PAC, Charles Schumer: source: Center for Responsive Politics Senator Schumer is a longtime sponsor of legislation for sanctions against China, on the basis of “unfair” currency practice or “currency manipulation”. His latest is the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2010. According to Schumer, at least as of April, […]

Thoughts on what I could not say in today’s Oxford Analytica piece — this time down to lack of space and a desire to preserve a detached tone. The piece is “Euro-area report card”, on how the externally-weaker eurozone members are faring in alleviating their overvaluations. As in the blog posts of recent weeks, the […]

One way I introduce the topic of the eurozone troubles is to review crises of recent decades. As is usual with currency crises, they compel some pretty heated rhetoric. It’s not surprising. When the currency is mismanaged — badly mismanaged — society suffers. Weimar Germany and Mugabe Zimbabwe are examples. So should be post-WW1 Britain, […]

Italysource: open-thinking.com Portugalsource: open-thinking.com Spainsource: open-thinking.com Italy and Portugal do not appear massively overvalued on these measures, about eight percent above where they started in 2000. This should not be hard to remedy. Spain has a further road to travel, about 16% overvalued on the BIS measure of real-effective exchange rates. Irelandsource: open-thinking.com Ireland is […]

Fragrant Harbor I gave a lecture to Georgetown MBA and public policy students here this morning, on the travails of the eurozone. Preparing this presentation forced me to collect the data and assess how “adjustment” is going so far in the Club Med economies. When I say adjustment, I mean getting prices in line with […]