The Dismal Economist

Paul Krugman seems to be visiting Japan these days, at least he has published his second Japan-related column within a few days. Although, contrary to what the title suggests, it is really more about his pet topic, Chinese undervaluation of the yuan and how it hurts US growth. But he takes the concerns about China’s […]

Tim Hartford wrote a defense of Economists (“Models tell us more than hindsight“), responding to his FT colleague Gideon Rachman‘s demand to “Sweep economists off their throne“. A few days ago, Rachman wrote in the FT: When Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, clashed with Niall Ferguson, a famous historian (and FT contributing editor), over […]

Paul Krugman’s recent NY Times column reviews the Japanese woes of the past two decades and draws conclusions for US economic policymaking: In the 1990s, Japan conducted a dress rehearsal for the crisis that struck much of the world in 2008. Runaway banks fueled a bubble in land prices; when the bubble burst, these banks […]

In today’s FT Martin Wolf tries to persuade my fellow countrymen that the introduction of the euro was actually benefical for Germany (Germans are wrong: the eurozone is good for them). According to a recent public-opinion poll, half of the German population would like to change the euro back into deutschmark. Albeit I have doubts […]

The New York Review of Books recently published an interesting piece, The Slump Goes On: Why?, by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Krugman and Wells discuss the origins of the 2008 crisis and the ongoing policy debates about the response to the crisis and its aftermath. In their article they refer to three recently published […]

Last week I had a post arguing that the time was ripe for the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to intervene in the foreign exchange market to halt the appreciation of the yen. Today, the FT writes: The Japanese yen hit another 15-year high on Wednesday despite fresh comments from the Japanese finance minister about the […]

Yesterday, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), Japan’s central bank, called in an ad hoc policy board meeting where it decided to further extend last December’s special liquidity programme by an additional Y10,000bn ($118bn) six-month credit facility. The effect on the markets, however, was negligible (the yen even strengthen against the dollar). The move was widely […]

The Economist published an interesting table with the world’s largest container ports in 1989 and in 2009: THE changes in distribution and cargo-handling capabilities of the world’s biggest container ports show the shifts that the world economy has undergone over the past two decades. The volume of cargo traded through the world’s biggest container ports […]

Today, Tim Besley gave the EEA’s Presidential Address, a lecture on “Fragile States and Development Policy”.  The lecture was a tour de force through his work with Torsten Persson on the causes of fragility and its consequences for development. For instance, in a recent paper called State Capacity, Conflict and Development, they highlight the absence […]

This week, I’ve been attending the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association at the University of Glasgow (a four-day overdose of economics). Last night, Joseph Stiglitz gave the Adam Smith lecture, in which he called for new approaches in macroeconomics. The criticism he raises – of the belief in market efficiency, ignorance of information […]