According to an intriguing article I read in Bloomberg recently an alert signal has been sounded due to the fact that house prices in the Scandinavian countries have been rising very rapidly of late. Judging by what they explain what is now going on in the housing markets of Norway, Sweden and Finland would seem … Read more
Testimony before the Hearing on the Treasury Department’s Report on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies, United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Summary and Recommendations 1. The US and Chinese global trade imbalances are increasing sharply. This makes it considerably harder to reduce unemployment and achieve a sustainable recovery in the … Read more
Summary: As we approach the 3 year birthday for this recession it becomes desperately clear that our leaders understand neither what’s happening nor how to fix it. A host of quacks have come forth with facile analysis and often painful cures. The same situation often prevailed in 19th century, when immature medical theory allowed quacks to … Read more
I am happy to say that I will be giving another speech at the IMF on Friday, September 17th, 2010, on the downside risks to the U.S. and the global economic outlook. Many of you have asked me for the now infamous speech that I gave at the IMF on September 7, 2006 with my … Read more
One of the things I think we can safely say about the impact of the current economic crisis is that the face of Macro Economic theory will never be the same again. Quite what the macro economics of the future will look like is too early to say, but what is clear enough is that … Read more
The Toronto G8+12 summit, under the pressure of financial markets and of the LCFE[1] lobby, declared the end of the World Keynesian Games. For the United States, it was an easier task to put together the “army of the willing” to go to the Iraq war than to obtain a coordinated set of policies to … Read more
The Phillips Curve was presented in the mid-fifties by the Australian economist A. W. Phillips: a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, that is, a negative correlation between inflation and unemployment. Ten years later, in the mid-sixties, the American economist Arthur Okun developed the so-called Okun’s Law: a positive relation between unemployment and the “output gap” … Read more
From the Daily Beast: The Dow fell below 10,000 in Tuesday trading following slumps in Europe and Asia but managed to close at 10,044. Leading economic thinkers Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer let readers in on their thoughts on why the economic crisis threatens the free market, who are the likely winners and losers, and … Read more
From Telegraph.co.uk: Here’s an exclusive extract from Nouriel Roubini’s new book, Crisis Economics. For the past half century, academic economists, Wall Street traders, and everyone in between have been led astray by fairy tales about the wonders of unregulated markets and the limitless benefits of financial innovation. The crisis dealt a body blow to … Read more
One nice things about writing a blog is that I don’t need to be topical. Not only can I write worriedly about rising contingent debt levels three or four years before they become obvious, but I can also revisit a controversy that took place March involving Paul Krugman and Stephen Roach. I revisit this old controversy … Read more