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December 10, 2008
Op-Ed
Washington Post
In this Washington Post op-ed, Amity Shlaes writes that huge public works projects, such as the one put forward by President-elect Obama, often fail to revive national economies, as evidenced by the example of Japan in the 1990s.
See more in Japan, Economic Development, U.S. Election 2008
December 4, 2008
Op-Ed
Washington Post
Sebastian Mallaby writes that the end-of-capitalism talk is bunk. It distracts us from the debate we should be having on how to manage the necessary shift in the balance of our mixed economy.
See more in Economics, U.S. Election 2008
December 3, 2008
Op-Ed
Bloomberg.com
After the National Bureau of Economic Research issued a routine report on our recent troubles, the Dow dropped 7.7 percent. In this Bloomberg op-ed, Amity Shlaes suggests that one reason markets reacted so negatively to a backward looking meter is the high standard set by our success in taming the business cycle since World War II.
December 3, 2008
Audio
Listen to Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, and Michael Levi, director of the program on energy security and climate change at CFR, discuss climate change and religious environmental activism as part of CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Conference Call Series.
See more in Climate Change, Environmental Pollution, Religion
December 1, 2008
Video
Watch Nobel Laureate in economics, A. Michael Spence, analyze the many policy measures addressing the global crisis.
See more in Economics, Business & Foreign Policy, Financial Crises
November 29, 2008
Op-Ed
Newsweek
In this Newsweek article, David Victor writes that in all the bad economic news, a new face of green is emerging. The green view based on small sources and market power will give way to one based on scale and subsidies.
See more in Economics, Energy/Environment
November 29, 2008
Op-Ed
Wall Street Journal
In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Amity Shlaes responds to the claim that the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough. Instead, she argues that massive government spending takes away jobs in the private sector.
See more in Economics, U.S. Election 2008
November 24, 2008
Op-Ed
John Templeton Foundation
Many critics believe that globalization sets back social and ethical agendas, arguing that globalization lacks a human face. But in this article for the John Templeton Foundation, Jagdish Bhagwati argues that actual outcomes are the opposite of those feared.
November 24, 2008
Op-Ed
Washington Post
Sebastian Mallaby says that desperate times demand creative remedies. Fortunately, Obama has chosen to surround himself with experienced technocrats-pragmatists who excel at imaginative improvisation.
See more in Economics, U.S. Election 2008
November 23, 2008
Op-Ed
Washington Post
In this Washington Post op-ed, Edward Alden writes that current immigration policy "was built in the wake of 9/11, but it will have to be reformed in the shadow of the economic crisis."
See more in Border and Ports, U.S. Election 2008
November 23, 2008
Op-Ed
San Francisco Chronicle
Since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. immigration policy has been focused mostly on keeping out those we don't want. In this San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Edward Alden argues that this single-mindedness has come with a high cost to our economy and reputation in the world.
See more in Border and Ports, Homeland Security
November 21, 2008
Op-Ed
Financial Times
In this Financial Times op-ed, Benn Steil argues that we need a "safe-fail" approach to preventing financial crises, aimed at limiting systemic damage after financial institutions fail.
See more in Economics
November 20, 2008
Expert Brief
CFR Senior Fellow Michael Levi writes that the financial crisis will affect U.S. near-term efforts to deal with energy security and climate change.
See more in Climate Change
November 20, 2008
Op-Ed
Nikkei Financial Daily
In this Nikkei article, Roger Kubarych says that the major threat facing the global economy and financial markets is an enormous decrease in the capacity for risk taking.
See more in Economics
November 20, 2008
Academic Module
This module features teaching notes by Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, along with other resources to supplement the text. In her book, Miss Shlaes asserts that the real question about the Depression is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II, but why the Depression lasted so long. She argues that federal intervention between 1929 and 1940 unnecessarily deepened and prolonged the Depression.
See more in United States, Financial Crises
November 20, 2008
Op-Ed
Wall Street Journal
In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Matthew Slaughter argues that a bailout for America's Big Three automobile companies could come with substantial costs, including decreased foreign direct investment into the U.S. and diminished access to foreign markets.
See more in Financial Crises, Congress
November 19, 2008
Op-Ed
Bloomberg.com
In this Bloomberg op-ed, Amity Shlaes argues that President-elect Obama should not use Keynesian solutions to address the economic crisis. She points out that the Great Society of the mid-1960s, which was the ultimate Keynesian experiment, did not work very well.
See more in U.S. Election 2008
November 17, 2008
Op-Ed
New York Post
In this New York Post op-ed, Amity Shlaes says that the Democratic Party is widening the definition of 'change' by the hour, using the financial crisis as a pretext to advance old social agendas. But government health care and ‘card check' legislation don't have much to do with mortgage crises.
See more in U.S. Strategy and Politics, U.S. Election 2008
June 2007
Book
In this timely book, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who, through their brave perseverance, helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today.
See more in United States, Financial Crises
November 13, 2008
Op-Ed
Washington Post
The financial insurance scheme known as the IMF has not kept up with the volume of capital flooding through the world's system. Sebastian Mallaby argues that it is time to radically update this insurance scheme and that government commitments to the IMF should be tripled.
See more in International Organizations
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In Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, the authors present a fascinating intellectual history of monetary nationalism from the ancient world to the present and explore why, in its modern incarnation, it represents the single greatest threat to globalization.
In The Closing of the American Border, Edward Alden goes behind the scenes to tell the story of the Bush administration’s struggle to balance security and openness in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In Termites in the Trading System, Jagdish Bhagwati reveals how the rapid spread of preferential trade agreements endangers the world trading system.
In Regional Monetary Integration, Peter B. Kenen poses an important question: Should various country groups follow the lead of the European Monetary Union and form similar full-fledged monetary unions?
In contrast to conventional wisdom, the growth in government spending and heightened regulation during the Great Depression may have done much to slow economic recovery.
In this report, Benn Steil shows that the financial crisis is the inevitable bust of a classic credit boom, and explains how monetary, taxation, and home ownership promotion policy combined with other feaures of the financial system to fuel an unsustainable buildup in debt. He recommends significant reforms to reverse the debt financing bias and make the system more resilient to falls in asset prices.
In order for policymakers to tackle today’s global economic crisis, this report argues, they must go beyond bailouts and stimulus packages and focus on one of the crisis's root causes: imbalances between savings and investment in major countries.
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