The European Central Bank (ECB) plan to lower the official interest rate from 0.15% to 0.05% will not work. What’s the difference between 0.05% and 0.15%? Nothing. There will be no increase in requests or approvals for loans resulting from this 0.1% cut. In July 2012, after lowering the interest rates from 1% to 0.75%, Mario […]
Don’t Trust What Economists Tell You
Because we economists tend to view reality through the lens of economic models, but I did enjoy one of John H. Cochrane’s comments in his blog “Macro debates, the oped.” For quite some time now, due to the recent crisis, I have been experiencing a lot of hesitation about these model-filtered visions. Cochrane, a University […]
Economic Policies Move in Cycles
To say that the economy moves in cycles doesn’t seem like a great discovery at this point. But here I am referring to the cycles that occur in economic policies. They are not new. In the 70s it seemed that inflation was inevitable and necessary to reduce unemployment, but then we had the worst of […]
Towards a re-balanced China
Since the start of the opening-up and reform period in 1978, the rest of the world has been stupefied by China’s long period of very high growth. Now all we hear about is that growth is slowing down. Further, this time the chinese authorities are not offsetting the slowdown by large fiscal and monetary stimuli: […]