Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 […]

The conclusion to Alarming errors in “Lessons” from the 1930s had a glaring error — now fixed! Perhaps it’s Freudian. It should read: More broadly, the threat to global prosperity is not the use of too much stimulus but too little. If we one day find ourselves in a more protectionist world, it won’t be […]

Partly for reasons of space, but more because I am cautions of repetition. My sense is the consumers of these analytical papers remain to be convinced how much relevance prior downturns, the Great Depression, and history in general have for today. That’s OK with me; I used to be of a similar view. Today’s brief is […]

Whether you’re from a left or right perspective, you can probably agree that policymaking played some role in the Great Depression. If you’re of a right/libertarian view you might see policymakers as having lacked the mettle to force the economy into a deflated-price equilibrium (or, more accurately, to force the factors of production (pdf) to accept new equilibria) […]

Angel Gurría explained this morning that protectionism is the real and present danger facing the world economy, citing the 1930s as an object lesson. This view no doubt enjoys considerable support. It is practically a ‘stylised fact’ in our historiography of the Great Depression (was the Smoot-Hawley tariff not in your high school textbook?). It […]