Crisis Compels Economists To Reach for New Paradigm

The pain of the financial crisis has economists striving to understand precisely why it happened and how to prevent a repeat. For that task, John Geanakoplos of Yale University takes inspiration from Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice."

The play's focus is collateral, with the money lender Shylock demanding a particularly onerous form of recompense if his loan wasn't repaid: a pound of flesh. Mr. Geanakoplos, too, finds danger lurking in the assets that back loans. For him, the risk is that investors who can borrow too freely against those assets drive their prices far too high, setting up a bust that reverberates through the economy. Read the complete article in the WSJ here.

Le grand retour de la bulle spéculative

En voulant sauver l'économie mondiale, a-t-on fait naître une nouvelle bulle qui sera à l'origine de la prochaine crise ?

Lisez l'article complet dans Le Monde ici.

Government guarantees on bank funding: Should we extend them into 2010 despite the improved bank profitability and the schemes’ distortionary effects?

In December 2009, government guarantees on the issuance of bank bonds will close to new issuance in many EU countries. This column argues that the guarantees have been effective and should be extended into 2010, despite improved market conditions and bank profitability. In doing so, governments should correct the schemes for some distortionary effects and develop a careful exit strategy.

Read the full article from A. Levy and F. Panetta on Vox.eu here.

Recent economische ontwikkelingen in Vlaanderen (Oktober 09)

Lees het volledige rapport van de Studiedienst van de Vlaamse Regering hier.

Will the current economic crisis lead to more retirements?

Since the crisis began, the economy has shed millions of jobs. This column explains how stock, housing, and labour market fluctuations affect retirement decisions. While wealthier workers will delay retirement, a larger number of workers will be forced into retirement because of their inability to find new jobs. This increased involuntary retirement will likely exceed any work-seeking effect of diminished stock market wealth by 50%.

Read this article from C.C. Coile and P.B.Levine on Vox.eu here.

Disincentives from Health Reform

Read this article on Greg Mankiw's blog here.

Design and effectiveness of fiscal-stimulus programmes

The recent global recession has made the efficacy of fiscal-stimulus packages one of the most prominent policy debates in economics today. This column finds that the multiplier of defence spending falls in a range of 0.6 to 0.8 and argues that non-defence multipliers are unlikely to be larger. It says we should be sceptical when policymakers claim government-spending multipliers in excess of one and suggests tax cuts may be preferable to spending increases.

Read the full article from R. Barro and C. Redlick on Vox.eu here.

Synthèse du Plan Marshall 2. vert

Lisez ce document ici.

Falling fertility

Astonishing falls in the fertility rate are bringing with them big benefits. Read the complete article in The Economist here.

A joyless recovery

THE American government reported on Thursday October 29th that gross domestic product rose at an annualised rate of 3.5% in the third quarter compared with the second. This was the first increase since the second quarter of 2008. It backs up other evidence that the recession ended in the third quarter or just before, though the official decision, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of academic economists, is still some way off. Robert Gordon, a member of this group, is confident that the recession, which began in December 2007, ended in June. But at 18 months that would still make it the longest since 1933. Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Education at a glance 2009

Find OECD indicators here.
Read the full OECD report here.

Household saving rate at 16.5% in the euro area and 14.4% in the EU 27

Read this Eurostat release here.

9 of 10 Europeans want urgent action on poverty

Read the Eurobarometer Survey on Poverty and Social Exclusion from the EC here.

Interview with Charles Krauthammer 'Obama Is Average'

In a SPIEGEL interview, Charles Krauthammer, the leading voice of America's conservative intellectuals, discusses Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the president's failures and the state of the United Nations and the international community. Read the complete interview in Der Spiegel International here.

The price of cleanliness

China is torn between getting greener and getting richer.

Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Financial crises are different! Refining the Reinhart-Rogoff estimates

Is the current turmoil unique? This column examines three decades of financial crises and says that it stands out. But the variation in past experiences suggests that the major economies may regain their pre-crisis levels of output by the second half of 2010.

Read this article from Cecchetti et al. on Vox.eu here.

Can renewable energy save the world?

Can renewable energy save the world from climate change, and do so at a reasonable cost? This column says we can replace some fossil fuel power with renewable power without a major cost increase, but we cannot hope to replace a major fraction of our fossil power with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar energy unless we can develop energy storage technologies.

Read the full article from G. Heal on Vox.eu here.

How to avoid a repeat of the Great Crash

The 80th anniversary of the Great Crash is upon us. This touches a nerve because we seemed to be looking into the same bottomless pit only a year ago. The chain of events, leading from a dramatic collapse in stock prices on Wall Street, beginning in late October 1929, to a Great Depression that engulfed the world economy for years, has suddenly leapt off the pages of the history books with an entirely fresh verisimilitude. Pessimists have asked, what is to stop it all happening again? Optimists have asked, what can we learn to stop it from doing so?

Read the full article in the FT here.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2009

Out of the 115 countries covered in the report since 2006, more than two-thirds have posted gains in overall index scores, indicating that the world in general has made progress towards equality between men and women, although there are countries that continue to lose ground.

Read this World Economic Forum report here.

Vers quel classement européen des universités?

Lisez la nota de l'Institut Thomas More ici.

Inburgering voor dummies

Marokko haalt meer inkomsten uit de diaspora dan uit zijn eigen economie.
INTEGRATIE VRAAGT MEER DAN EEN CURSUS NEDERLANDS — Zo lang via huwelijksmigratie de deuren van België wijd openstaan voor nieuwkomers en zo lang landen als Marokko profijt halen uit de slechte inburgering van hun uitwijkelingen, zal België integratieproblemen blijven hebben, voorspelt JEAN-MARIE DEDECKER. Dat los je op met nieuwe wetten, niet met een cursus Nederlands via internet. Lees het opiniestuk hier.

Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics (and climate change)

Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years. Read the complete article in the WSJ here.

Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis

Neither the rating agencies' mistakes nor the overleveraging by financial firms was the fault of an academic hypothesis. Read the complete article in the WSJ here.

Headlines Belgian Economy

Read this Federal Planning Report publication here.

U.S. Considers Reining In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions

Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year — how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get in trouble. Read the complete article in the NYTimes here.

Milieumisdrijven haast nooit bestraft

Lees het volledige artikel in De Standaard hier.

Do not ignore the need for financial reform

The philosophy that has helped me both in making money as a hedge fund manager and in spending it as a policy oriented philanthropist is not about money but about the complicated relationship between thinking and reality. The crash of 2008 has convinced me that it provides a valuable insight into the workings of the financial markets. ....

Read this article in the FT here.

Adjustments to the accountability and transparency of the European Central Bank

Governments are restructuring their financial supervision systems. This column warns that the proposed new structure for European financial supervision is poorly coordinated and will not help in a systemic crisis. It discusses how the ECB might coordinate macro-prudential supervision in the euro area.

Read the full article on Vox.eu here.

Een andere soort van staatshervorming

Luckas Vande Talen wil komaf maken met een rist overbodige instellingen. Lees het volledige opiniestuk in De Standaard hier.

Het nieuwe glossy tijdschrift voor de ambtenaar......

Sustainability report 2009

Read this EC report here.

Lessons of the lat

The European Union should ease the way for small, troubled currencies to join the euro. Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Betting on bytes

Optimism that tech firms will help kick-start economic recovery is overdone. Read the complete article in The Economist here.

Exporters (good ones) don’t pass-through

The prices of tradable goods are remarkably insensitive to exchange rate movements. This column provides a firm-level explanation. In response to a depreciation, high-performance firms raise their mark-ups rather than their export volumes, and their choices dominate the aggregate export variables.

Read this article from N. Berman et al. on Vox.eu here.

« Les Etats-Unis n'échapperont pas à un second plan de relance », Kenneth Rogoff

Professeur à Havard et ex-chef économiste du FMI de 2001 à 2003, Kenneth Rogoff, qui est également l'auteur du livre « Huit ­Siècles de folie financière » (Princeton University Press), analyse les conséquences du déclin du dollar et les limites du plan de relance américain.

Lisez l'interview dans LesEchos.fr ici.

Itinera fan!!!

Les 14 points clés du Rapport « Sortie de crise : vers l’émergence de nouveaux modèles de croissance ? »

Lisez cet utile résumé du Centre d'Analyse Stratégique ici.

THE WORLD IN 2025

The recent development of the world context and the strong European commitments to a regulated globalisation argue in favour of a prospective analysis of the trends which will shape the international environment, the tensions which will structure its development in the coming decades and the transitions that Europe could contribute to promote it. Read the complete report (25p.) from the European Commission here.

Why the euro is not the next global currency

The explosion of debate on the demise of the dollar has been instructive, though vastly premature. What is striking, however, is the absence of the euro from talk of alternatives as the global currency. Currency baskets, SDRs, even internationalisation of the renminbi, have been mooted, but not the obvious alternative. ....

Read the full article in the FT here.

Rising Debt a Threat to Japanese Economy

How much debt can an industrialized country carry before the nation’s economy and its currency bow, then break?

The question looms large in the United States, as a surging budget deficit pushes government debt to nearly 98 percent of the gross domestic product. But it looms even larger in Japan.
[...]
Just paying the interest on its debt consumed a fifth of Japan’s budget for 2008, compared with debt payments that compose about a tenth of the United States budget.

Read the complete article in the NYTimes here.