Chinese original sin

FT.com / Comment / Analysis – Man in the News: Huang Guangyu
Chinese today talk about “original sin”, although not in a way familiar to Catholics. It is the widely held belief that anyone successful in business must at some stage have cut corners.

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Unger taught Obama

Medvedev faces hard sell in Latin America – International Herald Tribune
“Unlike other South American countries, we don’t go around buying things, and we are not interested in some kind of balance-of-power politics to contain the United States,” said Mangabeira Unger, a former Harvard law professor who taught Obama when he was at Harvard Law School. [...]

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But if GM gets a bail-out, shouldn’t we all?

FT.com / UK – Doubts over €1bn Opel guarantee plan
On the other hand, the VDA has been careful not to reject the notion of a possible aid package from the government, not least because a possible car industry bail-out in the US could require a German response. The federation would support a Europe-wide initiative to [...]

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GM getting a bail-out in Germany? Probably.

FT.com / UK – Berlin set to give Opel €1bn guarantee
The flurry of activity around the ailing carmaker came as both Ms Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier – her foreign minister who will head his Social Democratic party’s ticket at next year’s general election – were accused of underestimating the severity of the economic crisis that [...]

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Lewis: “best way of learning a subject [is] to teach it”

Sir Arthur Lewis – Autobiography
This gave me a terrible sense of physical inferiority, as well as an understanding, which has remained with me ever since, that high marks are not everything.
Sir Arthur Lewis – Autobiography
I got into the history of the world economy because Frederick Hayek, then Acting Chairman of the LSE Department of Economics [...]

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Talbott on Obama’s challenges

FT.com – A need to master the tyranny of the urgent
Hence an overarching challenge for the next president will be a high order of multitasking. That will mean minimising the extent to which these tasks – each in its own way urgent – compete with one another. The only way to do that is to [...]

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Shiller on inequality

Robert Shiller argues the answer to the current financial crisis lies in the financial sector. He outlines three areas of action plus a “radical step.” Shiller favors a “Rising Tide Tax System” that is linked to inequality and would help decrease it.
The Real Mandate Is to Bridge the Wealth Gap – NYTimes.com
Changes in tax [...]

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Levi on anti-Americanism

FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Obama arouses a wild yet reasonable hope
Anti-Americanism will not suddenly, magically disappear. But it will have a harder time surviving and it will be forced to revisit its sales pitch.

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Eichengreen on China and the dollar

Project Syndicate
Of equal importance were the rise of China and the decline of investment in Asia following the 1997-1998 financial crisis. With China saving nearly 50% of its GNP, all that money had to go somewhere. Much of it went into US treasuries and the obligations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This propped up [...]

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Harold James on China’s role in the crisis

Project Syndicate
China is the America of this century. The initial stages of the credit crunch in 2007 were managed so apparently painlessly because sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, but above all from China, were willing to step in and recapitalize the debt of American and European institutions. The pivotal moment in [...]

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