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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.
One definition of globalization is the integration of economies and financial markets. By that definition, globalization has increased steadily since World War II. International trade has expanded more rapidly than global output, and cross-border financial flows have increased more rapidly than international trade—albeit with larger and deeper reversals. This process of global integration has been [...]
The economic news is grim the world over, but is it equally grim everywhere?
Based on the latest update of the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (January 2009), we estimate which country groups and countries are expected to see the greatest decline in growth during the crisis compared to their [...]
Last week the UK government announced new measures intended to prevent the British economy from imploding as a result of difficulties in the banking sector. Additional steps are needed because the investments in the banks announced in October, though widely applauded at the time, failed to restart bank lending to the [...]
This week, Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner stated clearly—and reassuringly—that the Obama administration will present a comprehensive and detailed economic recovery plan within a few weeks.
We know this plan involves a large fiscal stimulus, and it is reasonably clear there will be around $100 billion for housing refinance/mortgage mitigation (out of TARP II funding), and probably [...]
In a new onslaught of bad economic news in Europe, spreads among sovereign eurozone bond yields have risen sharply in recent months, accompanied by accelerating credit downgrades of the currency union’s weaker members (initially Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and perhaps Italy). But there is a beneficial aspect to these adverse developments in that they represent [...]
Some commentators have begun suggesting that the Federal Reserve should announce an inflation target now, with the idea that it will prevent inflation arising from the coming massive fiscal stimulus. In my opinion, it couldn’t hurt. As I argued with respect to Japan in 1998 [pdf], or as Ben [...]
It looks like a bank aggregator for bad assets is pretty much a done deal. David Axelrod said Sunday that we should expect a new approach within a few days, and leading reporters (New York Times, Washington Post) have discerned that this is likely to include a “bad bank” into [...]
Two pieces of economic data from the end of last year have made headlines.
The first, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on January 9, was that the unemployment rate rose in December from 6.8 to 7.2 percent—obviously bad news. The second item, released by the US Census Bureau, on January 13, was that the [...]
We have a deal. You, the US taxpayer, have generously provided to Bank of America the following: one Treasury-FDIC guarantee “against the possibility of unusually large losses” on a pool of assets taken over from Merrill Lynch to the tune of $118 billion, and a further Fed backstop if the Treasury-FDIC piece is not enough. [...]
After years of piling up huge foreign exchange reserves, China is increasingly seen by many analysts as entering a new phase. These analysts, who have been examining new data on China’s official holdings of foreign exchange reserves, have concluded that China is now experiencing substantial capital outflows and that Chinese reserve growth has essentially stopped. [...]