Matthew Yglesias says that these questions are too hard for him. Well, they are too hard for me too: Matthew Yglesias: Questions That Are Too Hard for Me: The way this is “supposed” to work is that Chinese people, being poor but growing rapidly, consume more than they produce. The curren...

Martin Wolf is gloomy: A year of living dangerously for the world: It is now almost a year since the US subprime crisis went global. Many then hoped that the repricing of risk would be no more than a brief interruption.... Such hopes have been disappointed.... So where is the world economy now? And ...

Something else to worry about?: Watch Out for Sovereign Debt Risk, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Commentary, WSJ: Optimists say that emerging-market defaults are a thing of the past. Emerging markets today, the argument goes, are relying more on domestically issued local currency debt, b...

April 14: Risks of International Financial Crisis Notes: Lecture Audio: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_mov/20080414_091122.mp3 International Financial Crises: http://delong.typepad.com/delongslides/2008/04/foreign-exchang.html Global Imbalances: http://delong.typepad.com/delongslides/2008/04/...

Dani Rodrik says that Argentina's future is bright--if only they could get their fiscal balance in order. Strangely, he doesn't seem to recognize that he is echoing every single Argentina-optimist for more than a century: Dani Rodrik's weblog: Will Argentina waste a historic opportunity? Rarely do y...

The question is, "why would emerging-market countries rely so heavily on foreign equity capital to finance the operations of local firms when they have access to a large pool of domestic savings that they are lending to the rest of the world?": Are Global Imbalances Due to Financial Underd...

April 11: International Finance and "Global Imbalances": Introduction Notes: Lecture Audio http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_mov/20080411_091301.mp3 Readings: Raghuram Rajan, "Global Current Account Imbalances: Hard Landing or Soft Landing?" http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2005/031505.ht...

Kenneth Rogoff says it's a good thing the Euro isn't "fully ready for primetime": Has the moment come to replace the US dollar?, by Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate: As the world's financial leaders meet in Washington this month at the ... International Monetary Fund annual meeting, perha...

Tim Duy is grim, over at Mark Thoma's Economist's View: Economist's View: Fed Watch: Inching Closer to the Reality of Stagflation: It is increasingly obvious that the Fed is in a no-win situation. The best case scenario for the Fed is that nominal wage growth is kept in check by a deteriorating labo...

He writes: Robert Reich's Blog: Hillary and Barack, Afta Nafta: It’s a shame the Democratic candidates for president feel they have to make trade – specifically NAFTA – the enemy of blue-collar workers.... NAFTA is not to blame.... When NAFTA took effect, Ohio had 990,000 manufactu...