Economy
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In the opening session of the fourth annual CFA Institute European Investment Conference today in Paris, MIT Sloan School of Management professor Simon Johnson didn’t equivocate on the perils of the current global economic environment. “We have built a dangerous financial system in the United States and Europe,” said the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “We must step back and reform the system.” Professor Johnson cited alarming parallels with October 1931, when “people thought the worst was behind them, but the smart people were wrong and instead the crisis just broadened.”
Simon Johnson: 'We Are Looking Straight Into The Face Of A Great Depression' - Seeking Alpha
Euro / Greece / Debts
It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery. For two years, officials at the Federal Reserve, international organizations and, sad to say, within the Obama administration have insisted that the economy was on the mend. Every setback was attributed to temporary factors — It’s the Greeks! It’s the tsunami! — that would soon fade away.
The Wrong Worries
The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved With Euros
Not long ago Europeans could, with considerable justification, say that the current economic crisis was actually demonstrating the advantages of their economic and social model. Like the United States, Europe suffered a severe slump in the wake of the global financial meltdown; but the human costs of that slump seemed far less in Europe than in America. In much of Europe, rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income. Europe’s might have fallen as much as ours, but the Europeans weren’t suffering anything like the same amount of misery.
Do government antitrust measures help break up monopolies and increase innovation? Not according to new research from the Technology Policy Institute , which looked at the high-profile antitrust investigations of IBM, AT&T and Microsoft. The research found that in each case, the innovation that changed the industry did not come as a result of government intervention, but from sources that regulators could not possibly have predicted. This is likely to be music to the ears of Google, which has come under increasing pressure from both regulators and critics as it expands beyond search into other areas — including a controversial acquisition offer for travel industry player ITA that is currently under review . The research (the full version of which is available as a PDF here ) was done by Robert Crandall — a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institute — and Charles Jackson, a computer science professor at George Washington University.
Innovation Kills Monopolies Faster Than Governments Can: Tech News and Analysis
La polémique Goldman Sachs
ECONOMY
The Future of Money
FMI ou pas FMI ?
the economics of Open Source
For three decades we have conducted a massive economic experiment, testing a theory known as supply-side economics. The theory goes like this: Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperity—so much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates. The late Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who wanted to shut down public parks because he considered them socialism, promoted this strategy. Ronald Reagan embraced Friedman’s ideas and made them into policy when he was elected president in 1980.
