Economics Roundtable

         My last blog post listed some policies and institutions with which various small countries around the world have had success — innovations that might be worthy of emulation by others.  Of course there are plenty of other examples of policies and institutions that have been tried and that are ...

     Two decades ago, many thought the lesson of the 1980s had been that the Japanese variant of capitalism was the best model, that other countries around the world should and would follow it.   The Japanese model quickly lost its luster in the 1990s.  

     One decade ago, many thought that ...

President Obama proposes allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire next year — as they are scheduled to do if nothing is changed — for those earning more than $250,000, but changing the law so as to extend the tax cuts for those earning less than that amount.   Republican politicians ...

With aftershocks of the recent global financial earthquake still being felt in some parts of the world, it would be useful to have a set of Early Warning Indicators to tell us what countries are most vulnerable.    Nobody should be surprised that it is not easy to forecast crises with ...

The big current economic question is what to do about budget deficits.   The Greek crisis has made sovereign debt a genuine concern even among advanced countries.  (I should say “especially among advanced countries,” because developing countries have stronger fiscal positions, in a historic role reversal.)   At this weekend’s G-20 ...

In the wake of the April oil well blowout off the coast of Louisiana, policy-makers are rethinking the issue of off-shore drilling.    Clearly the last decade’s neglect of safety rules by federal regulators needs to come to an end.   But what larger implications should we draw for domestic oil drilling? 

The ...

Last night I gave the Wall Street Journal a quote “…contagion has gone global”   which ran this morning under the headline “Greece Fuels Fears of Contagion in U.S.”    Some journalists have said that this quote may have contributed to the record plunge in the stock market during the day today, before ...

The NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee this morning posted an announcement that it had met in person - an infrequent event - April 8, and that it had not yet decided to call the trough in the recession that began in December 2007.    The meeting has led ...

The recession is over.   The last piece has fallen into place, with the BLS announcement that employment rose in March.

Identifying the beginnings and ends of recessions has been difficult in recent decades because the two most important indicators, output and employment, have sometimes behaved differently from each other.  ...

           April 1 is Census Day.  Evidently Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann are encouraging Americans to boycott the census — to refuse to fill out the whole form.   This protest follows from their small government ideology.

           I am not always sure what they, or Republicans, or Tea Party participants mean ...