The international relations of QE3
The Wall Street Journal has two great stories on the Federal Reserve's decision to go for QE3 -- a third round of quantitative easing. First, Jon Hilsenrath documents how Fed chairman Benjamin...
View ArticleWhoops there goes another China myth....
One of this blog's annoying tics persistent themes has been its insistence that the 2008 financial crisis did not, in fact, doom the United States to a future of inevitable decline. Indeed, there are...
View Article'Good enough' global governance and international finance
The Washington Post's Howard Schneider and Danielle Douglas have a story detailing the ways in which post-crisis global financial reform has allegedly ground to a halt: Five years after the collapse...
View ArticleThe currency war lobby
About six months ago, when the world's major central banks all started pursuing aggressive strategies of quantitative easing, I blogged that, "the international bitching and moaning about QE3 seems...
View ArticleThe pessimism bias on U.S. debt
Let's face it, Americans do not understand the current state of either macroeconomic policy or foreign policy terribly well. According to Bloomberg, only six percent of Americans know that the federal...
View ArticleGold is bunk
One of the lasting effects of the 2008 financial crisis was the belief that the distribution of economic power had radically shifted. China rising, West fading, yadda, yadda, yadda. A minor key in...
View ArticleThe surprisingly resilient global financial system
Well, this sounds like very bad news for the global financial system: A plan to rescue the tiny European country of Cyprus, assembled overnight in Brussels, has left financial regulators, German...
View ArticleFour thoughts on the Cyprus deal
So, after reading up on the Cyprus deal from the Financial Times, the Economist, and Quartz, I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened. Tyler Cowen isn't happy with the deal, and I can see...
View ArticleWill China's financial sector go boom? What about China's government?
An out-of-control shadow banking system that's been barely reformed. A housing sector that's been booming but seems primed for a bust. And despite a recent election that seemed to make it clear who...
View ArticleIt's the end of S&P mattering, and I feel fine
Hey, remember when Standard & Poor's downgraded U.S. sovereign debt back in 2011? Remember how your humble blogger thought it was based on really piss-poor political analysis before he fretted...
View ArticleIs Ben Bernanke a puppet of Basel?
When we last left off on this blog, the central banker of the world's largest economy was sending some odd signals to the marketplace. Despite a sluggish global economy with inflation nary to be...
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Following the money in Egypt
I go on vacation for one week -- one week -- and all hell breaks loose in Egypt. Unfortunately, given this morning's events, it seems increasingly likely that the best-case scenario for last week's...
View ArticleBe Careful What You Wish for from Chinese Policymakers
For years, I've read lament after lament that China's economic model, far from being the New New Thing, is badly broken, leading to all sorts of distortions and imbalances in the world. Only when the...
View ArticleToo Big to Lobby?
Your humble blogger has been fascinated by how and whether the financial sector has faced any kind of constraints in its lobbying efforts after, you know, almost plunging the global economy into a...
View ArticleA Short Q&A on Sanctioning Iran
So I see that Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to brief the Senate on why it should cool it with the Iran sanctions did not go terribly well. At all. Republican senators sharply criticized the...
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