January 2011
12 posts
Bob Shiller thinks more inequality is better
Tom Keene: The conservative response to this [plutocracy argument] is let the elite and the people aspiring to be elite…let them make their money and they will lift the others up with their American spirit. Comment on that. Robert Schiller. I am actually sympathetic to that view….The thing is, the United States is right now going through a philanthropic revolution. Notably we have Bill Gates...
Radio FM4: From the memory of the Swiss-Austrian... →
Switzerland: How red-blooded capitalism requires... →
Anat Admati, sharp as a knife and mischievous as the cheshire cat, writing that banks should hold multiples more equity than they currently do, in some cases by almost an order of magnitude. My banker friends would be outwardly dismissive but secretly alarmed by the wicked bit where she compares financial businesses to non-financial ones. But Ms. Admati has already lost this round on a...
Baruch makes Gordon Brown blush, repeatedly →
The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership by... →
Ken Weisbrode puts Farid Zakaria in a larger context and makes him look very small indeed
China doesn't want to be the United States. It... →
The Economist vs. Raghuram Rajan
A blundering editorial from the best newspaper in the world. For example, this is how it responds to Raghu Rajan’s claim that inequality created the conditions for the financial crisis:
As for the mooted link to the financial crisis, the timing is dodgy: America’s poor fell behind in the 1980s, the credit bubble took off two decades later.
Factually, this is not true. Leverage of...
In praise of a twit, Asia.View @ The Economist
Jan 11th 2011, 11:29 by S.M. | JAKARTA
IT WAS not without some pride that Indonesians awoke one November morning to find that their minister of communication had become a star performer in that American circus, “The Colbert Report”. Tifatul Sembiring had shaken Michelle Obama’s hand but felt terrifically embarrassed by it. In an apparent gesture of Islamic piety, the minister had warned...
Indonesia's Oil Problem, on Free Exchange, The...
Jan 11th 2011, 15:01 by S.M. | JAKARTA
WERE one told a decade ago that oil prices would quadruple but not seriously hurt growth in emerging economies, it would have seemed fantastic. (After all, the oil shocks of the 1970s substantially curtailed growth in Latin America). Yet this is precisely what has happened. As oil prices approach $100 a barrel, economists are wondering why.
Jon Anderson at...
