Ranis on foreign aid

Underdevelopment and Aid: Search for a Right Balance – Part I
The US National Security Strategy Memorandum of 2002 listed foreign aid as a critical anti-terrorism instrument and as one of the three main pillars of US foreign policy.
Underdevelopment and Aid: Search for a Right Balance – Part I
William Easterly and Dani Rodrik, for example, [...]

Read Full Post »

Summers sees potential in the crisis

FT.com / Columnists / Lawrence Summers – The pendulum swings towards regulation
Just as patients hear advice regarding diet and exercise differently after a heart attack, so recent events should make it possible for the next US administration to accomplish more than might previously have been thought possible.
FT.com / Columnists / Lawrence Summers – The pendulum [...]

Read Full Post »

Krugman on Nobel effect

Nobel to Princeton prof for work in economics | New Jersey Jewish News
“It’s stunning,” he said. “It hasn’t quite settled in.… One Nobel Prize can discombobulate your whole day.”

Read Full Post »

Bordo and James on a new role for the IMF

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment – The Fund must be a global asset manager
The multinational house of Rothschild made the first half of the 19th century stable. In the great panics of 1895-96 and 1907, the US economy was calmed by JPMorgan. At the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, there [...]

Read Full Post »

Keynes and the crisis

FT.com print article
Robert Skidelsky writes at the end of his definitive three-volume biography that Keynes’ ideas “will live so long as the world has need of them”. It certainly seems to need them now. Keynes was scathing about the view that the Great Depression was a return to normality, a necessary correction after the unsustainable [...]

Read Full Post »

Ehrenreich on deluded optimism

Op-Ed Contributor – The Power of Negative Thinking – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work [...]

Read Full Post »

Oil, Brazil and Sustainable Development

Project Syndicate – Print Commentary
But the discoveries place Brazil at a crossroads. Oil revenues can be controlled by the state to be used, in part, for social programs, as in Venezuela. Or private capital can be granted a bigger say, and trust placed in the market to provide for society.
Project Syndicate – Print Commentary
There is [...]

Read Full Post »

Easterly on the role of the state

Development Doesn’t Require Big Government
Development economics — the study of how poor countries can become rich — was forever cursed by the timing of its birth after the Great Depression. That gave development economics a bias toward relying on governments, rather than markets, to create growth.

Read Full Post »

Reevaluating Globalization

Global Crisis: How Far to Go? Part I
And with own wealth at stake, the ideology of self-regulating markets is easily forgotten, and recourse unabashedly made to state subsidies, so reviled only months earlier. It will be a long time before the cheerleaders of globalization can flaunt its textbook advantages with a straight face.
Global Crisis: How [...]

Read Full Post »

The Economist on markets and states

When fortune frowned | When fortune frowned | The Economist
In two tumultuous weeks the Federal Reserve and the Treasury between them nationalised the country’s two mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; took over AIG, the world’s largest insurance company; in effect extended government deposit insurance to $3.4 trillion in money-market funds; temporarily banned short-selling [...]

Read Full Post »