Economics & Global Affairs

3 Items

A man monitors stock prices at a brokerage house in Beijing.

AP Photo/Andy Wong

Analysis & Opinions - Jewish World Review

China's Three-Body Problem

| Oct. 08, 2019

The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like celebrating.

As Dutch historian Frank Dikotter has shown in his searing three-volume history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia, which escalated into a civil war.

A woman walks past an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index and other county's index at a securities firm in Tokyo on Monday, October 16, 2017. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

Analysis & Opinions - Project Syndicate

The Curious Case of the Missing Defaults

| Nov. 01, 2017

Booms and busts in international capital flows and commodity prices, as well as the vagaries of international interest rates, have long been associated with economic crises, especially – but not exclusively – in emerging markets. The “type” of crisis varies by time and place. Sometimes the “sudden stop” in capital inflows sparks a currency crash, sometimes a banking crisis, and quite often a sovereign default. Twin and triple crises are not uncommon.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, talks with Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, and Haruhiko Kuroda, head of the Bank of Japan, during a break at the central bankers conference at Jackson Hole, Wyo., Friday, Aug. 25, 2017. The conference, in its 41st year, is sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. (AP Photo/Martin Crutsinger)

AP Photo/Martin Crutsinger

Analysis & Opinions - Project Syndicate

The Persistence of Global Imbalances

| Aug. 30, 2017

The primary focus of this year’s Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which convenes the world’s leading central bankers, was not explicitly monetary policy. Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s opening remarks emphasized the changes in regulatory policy that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, while European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s luncheon address dwelled on the need for continued reforms in Europe to sustain the eurozone’s recent economic recovery.