Category Archives: International Economics

I thought of the movie Trading Places when I saw the term HIIC in the headline of today’s Wall Street Journal article by Kelly Evans. The new term refers to the “Heavily Indebted Industrialized Countries” and of course to the … Continue reading →

Currency strategists at the Scotiabank are using “policy rule differentials” rather than simple “interest rate differentials” in a creative way to predict interest rate and currency movements. As reported in this Bloomberg piece Taylor Rule Gap with U.S. at 15-Year … Continue reading →

I was in a hotel room in Tokyo when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Recently sworn in as Under Secretary at Treasury, I was part of a delegation to Japan that included Paul O’Neill and many reporters, … Continue reading →

The Soviet Union used to provide me with plenty of current event stories to tell students in Economics 1 about the wastes and harms of price controls and central planning. But most first-year college students taking introductory economics this fall … Continue reading →

Does China’s remarkable economic growth, its stability during the recent financial crisis, and its immense foreign aid/investment in Africa raise doubts about free market policies and provide evidence in favor of a more interventionist approach? In a new review paper, … Continue reading →

Poland is the only country in the European Union which did not have a recession during 2009, as shown in this chart. And among all the OECD countries, Poland had the best real growth performance in 2009. I visited Poland … Continue reading →

Many economists argue that the Greek government, even with the help of the European/IMF rescue package, will eventually have to restructure its debt. Just last Friday in a Bloomberg News story Thomas Mayer, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, said this … Continue reading →

This past weekend’s meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Korea ended with a rejection of calls for more fiscal stimulus. This is a marked change from their meeting held just over a month ago in … Continue reading →

In a column Central Banks are Losing Credibility published in the Financial Times last Tuesday, just after the announcement of the European rescue plan, I noted that the euro’s quick set-back hours after its initial boost was a harbinger of … Continue reading →

Three years ago, a study of low and declining prices on Iraq’s debt by Michael Greenstone of MIT helped paint a bleak picture of the effectiveness of the surge, as, for example, in this November 2007 New York Times op-ed … Continue reading →