In my post yesterday on the difference between pro-business and pro-market impulses of conservative policy, I neglected an obvious point: that Democrats - or more precisely, the swath of the political spectrum that the Democrats represent - vary in the strength of their support for the market. What’s surprising about this presidential primary race so […]
Joseph Stiglitz today takes on the blame-China crowd and puts what’s at stake forcefully and simply:
To understand what is at stake, a few basic economic points need to be spelled out. First, international trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage: countries export goods in which they have a relative advantage and import goods […]
As a follow up to my post on the yuan last week, I should point out that Paul Krugman has addressed the issue in his op-ed today. Perhaps trying to coopt the move of Democrats to focus on China as an economic scapegoat, Bush has been sending Treasury Secretary snow to China to try to […]
It’s early in the campaign, but one of the most distressing sign is the return of retrograde, if not downright protectionist, trade policy from just about all of the Democratic candidates. Offender number one, of course, is Howard Dean, whose brash calls for tearing down the WTO and requiring international labor standards the same as […]
The Guardian has launched a new weblog dedicated to ending first-world agricultural subisidies. For an explanation of the website and its reason, they have a leader polemic against subsidies today. (And worth checking out too are a series of NY Times op-eds on the subject). As they note, this is one of the few topics […]
The Economist releases its annual Big Mac Index. Often they use the Big Mac purchasing power parity index to determine the likely trajectories of currencies by seeing which ones are over or undervalued. They do, however, concede a couple of exceptions. First,
there are some persistent deviations from PPP. In particular, emerging-market currencies are consistently […]
I’ve used the Guardian’s George Monbiot as a straw man before, but I’ll use him again, for his piece today, arguing that the only way Britain can resist the US’s power is by joining the Euro. Military competition is futile, and trade boycotts would simply be symbolic he argues. Instead, Monbiot wants to attack the […]
There seems to be much talk about how if the US stays in recession, the global economy will have no engine because Japan and Europe fail to enact the structural reforms that will get their economies rolling again. The prediction may turn true, but the assessment seems to overlook the macroeconomic problems Japan and Europe […]
Floyd Norris has a great commentary piece in today’s Times, taking on Treasury Secretary Snow’s critics and arguing that we need to rethink the U.S.’s strong dollar policy:
To John Paul Rathbone…such borrowing is evidence that the United States is “taking on the financial characteristics of a banana republic.” That’s a hostile view from Britain. But […]