Hard on the heels of his tour of China—a visit that produced mixed results and even more mixed reviews—President Obama welcomes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the White House in the first state visit of his presidency. For both Mr. Obama and Dr. Singh, the trip will be important symbolically, politically, [...]

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“American taxpayer dollars should not be used to finance those Chinese jobs.“

Who could disagree with Senator Schumer’s statement, which accompanied his recent call for cancellation of $450 million in federal stimulus funds for a new $1.5 billion wind park in Texas—on the grounds that it [...]

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“Banking on the State” [pdf] by Andrew Haldane and Piergiorgio Alessandri is making waves in official circles. Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, is widely regarded as both a technical expert and as someone who can communicate his points effectively to policymakers. He is obviously [...]

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The city of London has been Europe’s dominant financial center since the 18th century, and its prominence has been especially marked in the decade before the current financial crisis. The city has succeeded by combining the intermediation of global financial imbalances, channeling Asian and Middle Eastern savings toward investment products in [...]

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Pundits and policymakers around the world are wringing their hands over the possibility of further declines in the foreign exchange value of the dollar. Predicting exchange rates is notoriously difficult; there is almost as much chance of the dollar rising next year as of it declining. But if the [...]

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With short-term, risk-free interest rates essentially at zero in the major developed economies, conventional monetary policy is in a liquidity trap. As a number of commentators have observed, printing zero-interest-rate money to buy zero-interest-rate assets has no real economic effect because the assets are near-perfect substitutes for money. But does that [...]

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Whether to use public money to rescue financial firms because they are too big, too complex, or too interconnected to be allowed to fail is not a new issue. However, in the financial and economic crisis of the last year and a half, the number and nature of such rescues in [...]

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The G-20 finance ministers and Central Bank governors met over the weekend in St. Andrews, talking about the data they will need to look at in order to monitor each other’s economic performance and sustain growth (seriously).
The underlying idea is that if you talk long enough about the US current account deficit and [...]

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President Obama’s trip to East Asia over the next two weeks comes at an important time in Asian regionalism. East Asian governments have been moving on several fronts toward regional cooperation and, while some skepticism might be justified, the rest of the world would be wrong to dismiss these developments as [...]

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Meeting in London last April, the G-20 leaders declared “that the heads and senior leadership of the international financial institutions [i.e., the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund] should be appointed through an open, transparent, and merit-based selection process [pdf].” When you look at the selection processes for [...]

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