 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Sign up to receive automatic updates to RealTime Economic Issues Watch.
A website forum in which senior fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics discuss and debate their responses to global economic and financial developments as they occur each day and offer insights that others might overlook.
There will be an eerie familiarity to this weekend’s G-20 meetings. Disagreements between the United States and Europe on two important issues—macroeconomic policy, and specifically the timing of withdrawal of policy support, and financial regulation—will characterize these meetings. Resolution of these issues seems unlikely. The verdict will be that [...]
Last weekend’s announcement by China to introduce greater exchange rate flexibility is unambiguously good news. Greater currency flexibility will help China with its domestic overheating problem. But China deserves a lot of credit for its act of responsible international citizenship, for making its contribution to global rebalancing. Two implications follow.
First, [...]
If China does let its currency start rising again, as widely speculated, the overriding issue is whether it will move quickly and substantially enough. The renminbi is undervalued by about 25 percent on a trade-weighted average basis and by about 40 percent against the dollar. No one expects China to curtail [...]
Intellectually, there are two ways of being in denial about renminbi undervaluation. The first is to succumb to what John Williamson has called the doctrine of immaculate transfer. Paul Krugman, in his recent blog posts, has been taking Stephen Roach and Joe Stiglitz to task for doing so: i.e., for [...]
The US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is off to India to launch the new bilateral economic dialogue focused on macroeconomic stability, financial markets, and infrastructure financing. Geithner has a long association with India, where he spent some of his childhood in the 1980s as the son of a Ford Foundation [...]