Articles

India’s economic leaders are determined to rein in skyrocketing inflation, but the country’s volatile political landscape may prevent reforms from taking hold.

Historians like labels. X history. History of y. The labels carve out subjects, set boundaries in time and space, at times even suggest methodological commitments.

The short answer is yes. For the long answer I will make you sit through seven paragraphs.

Finance is built on trust. It is based on promises about tomorrow, often paper promises backed by nothing other than words on a page. When trust in those promises breaks down, so too does the financial system. That is the lesson of thousands of years of history.

The United States government openly flirting with a default on its debt is, to the financial system, like a Pope wondering out loud about the existence of God.

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

The current economic and financial crisis has given rise to a vigorous debate about the state of economics, and the training which graduate and undergraduates economics students are receiving. Importantly, among those arguing most strongly for a change in the way that young economists are trained are the ultimate employers of these students, in both the private and the public sector. Employers are increasingly complaining that young economists don’t understand how the financial system actually works, and are ill-prepared to think about appropriate policies at a time of crisis.

what have we learned from the crisis and what should we have learned?

Simon Johnson, Professor at MIT and former chief economist of the IMF, calls for much higher capital requirements for big banks.

The global financial cycle has transformed the well-known trilemma into a ‘dilemma’. Independent monetary policies are possible if and only if the capital account is managed directly or indirectly. This column argues the right policies to deal with the ‘dilemma’ should aim at curbing excessive leverage and credit growth. A combination of macroprudential policies guided by aggressive stress‐testing and tougher leverage ratios are needed. Some capital controls may also be useful.