In these fraught political times, it’s good to take a step back from the day to day minutia. In the grand scheme of things, global quality of life has dramatically improved. In 1820, 94% of the worl...
Technological progress continues unabated. The astonishing rate of growth has fueled heated debates about implications on the future of labor and the nature of work. A decade ago, few would have predi...
by Fabrice Grinda and Mike Lloyd Many people have been amazed at the support that Donald Trump has been able to amass since he threw his red “Make America Great Again” hat into the ring to be the...
Hang around venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and a clear sense of fear pervades the air. The main topic of conversation these days seems to be of humbled or fallen unicorns. Many are writing down...
Global interest rates are now at historical lows. Conversely we are seeing record prices for asset prices be they share prices of listed companies, privately held Internet startups, art, collectible c...
I have had the pleasure of meeting professor Tyler Cowen a few times and always left my meetings impressed by his intellect. He writes the popular economics blog: Marginal Revolution. He just wrote a...
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Loic Lemeur asked Jeff Clavier and me to react to Arnaud Montebourg’s presentation at LeWeb and ask him a few questions. I suggested France might adopt some measures that would make the economy mo...
Over the course of the last few years I resolved the cognitive dissonance between my short term pessimism about the economy and my personal optimism about humanity, the technology world I inhabit and ...
Dominic Barton, the managing director of McKinsey, recently gave an insightful speech at Stanford Business School. I encourage you to watch it. ...
Over the past few years the economist in me has been profoundly pessimistic about the short and medium term economic destiny of the developed world, a view that is profoundly at odds with my fundament...
A few months ago, I started writing an analysis of our global economic situation that I wanted to present in the form of an optimistic thought experiment. That article has become so long and complicat...
I just came across this very well thought through article on everything that could go wrong for the US in the 21st century should we continue down the current path. It covers all aspects of the probl...
My good friend Auren Hoffman posited that existing nation states would benefit from a little bit of creative destruction and competition to maximize the welfare of their “customers“: http://blog.s...
Great interview of Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer in Foreign Policy. Read it at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/05/just_how_bad_is_bad ...
Over the last two weeks I had the pleasure of attending the eG8 Summit in Paris at the invitation of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and being invited to tea with David Cameron, the Prime Minister of...
I recently wrote how the world is less globalized than we suspect it is and how we now spend $88 billion a year in visa processing fees. What is not included in this figure is the extraordinary opport...
As I was reading The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely’s sequel to the brilliant Predictably Irrational, I started wondering whether there were macro implications and applications for beha...
I was shocked that the statistics I came across in a recent article in The Economist which presented Pankaj Ghemawat’s research on globalization. We seem to take it as a given that we live in a glo...
I posted a while back a written transcript of the speech. Stephen Meade recorded the speech and was nice enough to share it with me. ...
I wanted to share with you something that has been on my mind lately as I have been suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. I am the most optimistic person I know. I suppose it comes ...
I argued in a prior post that the best way to deal with a deflating bubble was not to try to reflate that bubble. Instead of letting the real estate market reach equilibrium by letting prices fall to ...
Over the past few years I have often felt like Cassandra with my dire and pessimistic economic predictions. This fundamental pessimistic outlook was so contrary to my fundamentally optimistic outlook ...
… but probably not the beginning of the end! It is interesting to see the speed at which sentiment seemingly switches. Last October and in late February and early March of this year, people seemed d...
I had the pleasure of studying under Uwe Reinhardt at Princeton. He was by far the best teacher. He gave such entertaining presentations, full of jokes and anecdotes, that he managed to make accountin...
I had the pleasure of being invited to a dinner organized by the Princeton University Center for Economic Policy Studies (CEPS) where George Soros spoke on the current economic crisis. I very much en...
The story of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs should be a cautionary tale to present-day policymakers. The tariffs did not cause the Great Depression, but they deepened its severity and duration. All of the e...
As a society and as individuals we are loth to take responsibility for our actions. We much prefer finding scapegoats or blaming circumstances. I was recently asked who was to blame for this crisis. ...
During the past few years, I often felt I was the sole economic pessimist. I urged my friends and whoever would listen to rent and not buy their apartments (Rent … unless you want to buy, I professe...
I am not usually a fan of his style, but in this case, his outburst was justified and eerily prescient! ...
By Steven E Worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Yes—but don't be cowed by talk of calamity. Disasters call for prudence and circumspection, not frenzied action. Congress, in particul...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are privately owned and run government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Fannie Mae was founded as a government agency in 1938 to develop the secondary mortgage market. In 1968,...
In the past few years, I have been extremely pessimistic about the US economy. I explained that most pundits seemed to be underestimating the deflationary risks to the economy (A Different Perspective...
By Stacie Rabinowitz I’ve been a bit perturbed lately reading about some of the responses to the global food crisis. I’ve seen a lot of reports that governments and NGOs are donating money to buy...
The first time I got an insight into Sarkozy’s character was reading The Economist review of his literary biography L’Aube le soir ou la nuit by Yasmina Reza. It showed both the scale of his ambit...
"Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of ...
On Tuesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar sponsored by McKinsey on China’s Business and Policy Evolution at the Asia Society (http://www.asiasociety.org/) in New York. The panel...
I am an economist by formation and at heart if not by trade and I am appalled by the terrible quality of the economic policy recommendations from essentially all candidates from both parties. The tim...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions! In public policy above all else, I have often found that some of the best intentioned laws end up having the opposite effect and hurt the very constitue...
Friends of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week. Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine ...
I had the pleasure of attending yet another one of Mark Gerson’s phenomenal Shabbos dinners two weeks ago and the guest speaker made a very interesting point. He argued that while it is easy to be ...
A recent article in the Financial Times showed that French and German schoolbooks demonize enterprise. As the article put it: “Students learn that companies destroy jobs, while government policy cr...
As I wrote in a recent article (Capitalism and Democracy), despite decreases in global inequality because of economic growth in South East Asia, in-country income inequality has been rising. However, ...
I had the pleasure of listening to my good friend Einat Wilf (www.wilf.org) speak on the future of Israeli politics at Danny Gillerman’s house last night. She is ever the brilliant orator and made a...
I recently came across an article entitled “How Capitalism is Killing Democracy” by Robert Reich. The article is an adaptation from his book “Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Dem...
By answering the following 11 questions you see where you stand relative to the candidates: http://www.wqad.com/Global/link.asp?L=259460 The results can actually be very interesting :) ...
Last February I blogged about how excess petrodollar liquidity was creating bubbles all around the world and how I was pessimistic in the short and medium term for the US economy (Macro Perspectives o...
It occurred to me a year ago that Bloomberg would make a great president. He has been a very effective mayor of New York. He restored fiscal balance and cooperated with the democrats after the factiou...
Tony Blair is probably the most gifted politician of his generation. He is smart, open minded and a gifted orator. Moreover, I have repeatedly been impressed by his sense of purpose, decisiveness and ...
By most measures these are the best of times. We live longer, healthier lives than ever before. Our average income, standards of living and quality of life have improved across the board. Unemployment...
I just came across a book written about a 45 year old Frenchman. He owns a large studio with a beautiful view on a garden. He owns an Alfa Romeo and leads a simple and pleasant life. His job: unemploy...
Despite the fact that quality of life is actually very good in France, there is clearly a French malaise. People have a (real) sense of stagnation as their standard of living is not increasing as fast...
Regardless of where you stand on immigration, demographic shifts in Mexico will render the issue meaningless in the coming 10 years. I was partaking in a New America luncheon on immigration and the sp...
Before I begin, let’s start with a few basic macro-economic foundations. A country can either control its interest rates or its currency. It cannot control both at the same time. When you increase i...
If you were an economist arriving from Mars and looked at capital flows around the world, you would be very surprised by the patterns you observe. Ex-ante you would have expected the wealthiest countr...
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2007/gb20070214_899890.htm?link_position=link1 A few days after I recommended we should create a carbon emissions market, China creates a carbon-credi...
Global warming seems to be on the mind of many these days. There is no denying that the earth has warmed up over the last century. There is also increasing evidence and a growing consensus among scien...
Turn the pages of any paper covering foreign policy and it is easy to become depressed about the state of the world: massacres in Darfur, quagmire in Iraq, setbacks in Afghanistan, nuclear ambitions i...
I just arrived in Paris from Buenos Aires for LeWeb3 conference organized by Loic Lemeur. I was horrified to see all the stores open on a Sunday! Had France given in to consumerism? Did the French gov...
Parkinson's Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” “Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard t...
According to an OECD report bad governance is the number 1 cause of poverty around the world – further reinforcing my analysis that governments rarely help the people they supposedly serve and can o...
Watch it fully! (Don’t get thrown off by the few seconds of George Bush at the beginning). Ben taught me macro-economics at Princeton :)...
I have been appalled recently by the low quality of the debate on immigration from politicians throughout the political spectrum. Immigration defenders have claimed that immigrants do jobs Americans d...
There is something highly ironic about seeing hundreds of thousands of students in France demonstrate against the CPE “contrat de première embauche”, a more flexible labor contract for those unde...
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