The idea that it is possible to achieve apparently conflicting objectives is not confined to public policy. Henry Ford, with his famous $5 working day, both made his workers better off and raised his profits. Ford’s example has recently been followed by Aetna, Walmart and others.

Often markets are volatile at the end of the year — as many traders go on holiday and those with losses unload them — and then settle down as a new year begins. Not this year. U.S. and European markets closed significantly lower on Friday after a very rough week despite a very strong U.S. jobs report. The week’s economic news was dominated by dramatic declines in China’s stock market and currency; the week also saw a further plunge in oil priceseven in the face of major tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Sen. Bernie Sanders had an op-ed in the New York Times on Federal Reserve reform last week that provides an opportunity to reflect on the Fed and financial reform more generally. I think that Sanders is right in his central point that financial policy is overly influenced by financial interests to its detriment and that it is essential that this be repaired. At the same time, reform requires careful reflection if it is not to be counterproductive. And it is important in approaching issues of reform not to give ammunition to right-wing critics of the Fed who would deny it the capacity to engage in the kind of crisis responses that, judged in their totality, have been successful in responding to the financial crisis. The most important policy priority with respect to the Fed is protecting it from stone-age monetary ideas like a return to the gold standard, or turning policymaking over to a formula, or removing the dual-mandate commanding the Fed to worry about unemployment as well as inflation.

The Federal Reserve meets this week and has strongly signaled that it will raise rates. Given the strength of the signals that have been sent, it would becredibility destroyingnot to carry through with the rate increase, so there is no interesting discussion to be had about what should be done on Wednesday.

While debate about the relevance of the secular stagnation idea to current economic conditions continues to rage, there is now almost universal acceptance of a crucial part of the argument. It is agreed that the “neutral” interest rate, which neither boosts nor constrains growth, has declined substantially and is likely to be lower in the future than in the past throughout the industrial world because of a growing relative abundance of savings relative to investment.

For the first time in centuries, China now affects the global economy as much as it is affected by the global economy. In the years ahead, China is likely to account for between a third and half of growth in global incomes, trade and commodity demand, and its significance will only increase as its share of the world economy rises.

An e-book containing the papers and presentations from the European Central Bank's central banking forum conference in Sintra, Portugal, is now available. ECB President Mario Draghi and his colleagues are to be greatly commended for running a forum that is so open to profound challenges to central banking orthodoxy.

The volume contains a paper by Olivier Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti and me on hysteresis — and separately some of my reflections asserting the need for a new Keynesian economics that is more Keynesian and less new.

Here, I summarize these two papers.

One of us, a former member of the Obama administration, remains a fan of the president. The other, not so much. But we agree on one thing: The excise tax on high-cost health care plans, the so-called Cadillac tax, is good policy. Congress should side with President Obama and resist calls to scrap it.

As the world’s financial policymakers convene for their annual meeting Fridayin Peru, the dangers facing the global economy are more severe than at any time since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008.

I did not support the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military, and believe it should have been repealed long before it was. I believe the invasion of Iraq was a grave mistake and that the United States’ participation in Vietnam was catastrophic. But none of those judgments led me, in any way, to back away from support for the military itself and for those who served in it. I do not believe that the support of this university, or any other university, for the military should be contingent on the political decisions of those who exert civilian control over it.