November 13, 2004
Budget, Debt, and DeficitsThis post is primarily about the implications of partial privatization of social security on the budget, not about its overall merits. For what it is worth, I personally think good old pay-as-you-go …
April 11, 2005
United StatesAltogether, the circumstances seem to be as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness o…
January 8, 2005
A standard rule of thumb, mentioned by Paul Blustein in his excellent look at the impact of a falling dollar on US trade last week, is that a 10% fall in the broad dollar leads to a $100 billion fall…
June 30, 2005
Capital FlowsThe CNOOC bid presumably is motivated by two things. One, Beijing has plenty of cash, and already holds more Treasuries than it wants, so it wants to diversify its portfolio. As I argued earlier, C…
June 22, 2005
Capital FlowsChina is on track to add between $250 and $300 billion to its reserves this year. That is a lot of money. Enough to have an impact on global bond markets. Enough to buy several oil companies. As…
June 19, 2005
ChinaReuters has done a nice wrap up of what we know -- and more importantly what we don’t know -- about how China manages its reserves. They correctly note that the TIC data misses so much that it, alon…
August 19, 2005
Capital FlowsI agree with Mark Thoma more often than naught. I certainly share his concern about the shifting sectoral composition of output (translated from economese to English, more jobs in housing), and, li…
October 2, 2005
EuropeI agreed with a lot of what Fareed Zakaria wrote about Germany - certainly I would agree that Germany has done a lot more reform than France over the past few years.Compare Germany with France. In Ge…
August 8, 2005
United StatesBrad DeLong and the folks over at Angry Bear have already beat up on this rather ridiculous Donald Luskin argument that the US does not take on debt when it runs a trade deficit. I hardly need to …
October 16, 2005
ChinaClearly not, given his role in the Bush/ Cheney 2004 campaign. But he also seems to think China should develop a social insurance system to help spur domestic consumption. Read Friday's Wall St…