The U.S. dollar is much in the news these days and there is a sense that the world economy may have become excessively reliant on the dollar. This reliance smacks of dysfunctional co-dependence whereby the U.S. and the rest of the world both rely on the dollar’s strength, but neither is well served by it. Read the rest of this entry »
Why the World Pays Dollar Tribute
June 30th, 2006Markets and the Common Good
June 12th, 2006Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, there are indications that the Democratic Party may finally be awakening from its long slumber and realizing it lacks a compelling identity. That lack of identity is especially clear regarding the economy, and it contrasts with Republicans who have long emphasized free markets. The current moment of Republican unraveling offers Democrats an historic opportunity to close this identity gap and change the direction of American politics. Read the rest of this entry »
Time for a New Trade Agenda
May 26th, 2006The Doha round of trade liberalization negotiations is in deep trouble, and with good reason. Though positioned as a “development†round intended to benefit the world’s poorest countries, it in fact does little in that regard. On close examination Doha turns out to be a Trojan horse that pushes the type of trade liberalization that has made globalization so deeply unpopular and unfair. Read the rest of this entry »
Immigration Anxieties: Worker Rights is the Solution
May 12th, 2006A lot of newspaper ink has been spilled over immigration. So why write another op-ed? The reason is that the economics behind the debate remains badly out of focus, and understanding that economics is key to carving a passage through this nastiest of political wedge issues. Read the rest of this entry »
A Galbraithian Lens on Globalization
May 2nd, 2006John Kenneth Galbraith died on April 29, 2006 at the age of 97, having led a life filled with honor and accomplishment. Unfortunately, his ideas are largely ignored by today’s economics profession. His recent death marks an occasion for spotlighting the continuing relevance of those ideas and the ideological narrowness of a profession that makes no space for them. Read the rest of this entry »
Can Globalization Fail? Lessons from History
April 26th, 2006Around the world there are growing rumbles about globalization, and these rumbles are not confined to activist anti-globalization movements. In East Asia, the financial crisis of 1997 left a jaundiced sense of globalization, though robust economic recovery has tempered that. Globalization’s standing has also been badly damaged in Latin America by the meltdown of the Argentine economy in 2000 and successive financial crises in Brazil in 1999 and 2001. In Europe, new fear about globalization is surfacing in a range of countries. In Poland it has taken the form of concern about foreign capital taking over the Polish banking system, and foreign takeover fears also permeate France and Italy. In France and Germany, working people link globalization with pressures to dismantle the social democratic state. Read the rest of this entry »
Pressure China to Change
April 13th, 2006China’s President Hu Jintao will visit Washington DC next week (April 20) where he will meet with President Bush. For the last several years, China’s under-valued exchange rate has been imposing large costly distortions on the American economy. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has taken no action. Instead, it has allied itself with multi-national corporations who are profiting handsomely from the current U.S. – China economic relationship, which allows them to import cheap Chinese products on which they earn huge margins. If the President won’t take decisive action to get China to significantly revalue its exchange rate, Congress should. Here is an economic indictment against China that justifies such action. Read the rest of this entry »
The House Price Bubble: Won’t Get Fooled Again
April 8th, 2006One of my all time favorite rock albums is The Who’s “Who’s Next†and one of my favorite tracks on that album is “Won’t Get Fooled Again.†Right now there is much talk of a housing bubble, making for the possibility that a lot of people are getting fooled. Read the rest of this entry »
The Split Within Organized Labor
March 25th, 2006For the last year there has been a widening split within the ranks of American organized labor, and this split risks hardening as the new Change to Win (CTW) coalition increasingly takes on the complexion of a rival labor federation. Read the rest of this entry »
The Weak Recovery and the Coming Deep Recession
March 15th, 2006To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.†Many (including myself) expected that the bursting of the stock market and Internet bubbles in 2001 would cause a deep recession owing to large excesses of borrowing and spending by both the household and corporate sectors. Now we know that the recession of 2001 was fairly mild and of short duration, though the economic recovery has also been the weakest since World War II. Read the rest of this entry »