We’ve pelted Donald Trump with all the withering humor we can muster, and even though it is hard to imagine an easier target for elitist humor, with his blustering narcissism, his intellectual inconsistency, his questionable business record, and his truly stupid television show, above all of which rages his ferocious hair, it’s been so frustrating. […]
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Interpreting information in China’s stock markets
Anyone who reads my blog is already likely to know the story. Until the market peaked on June 12, with the Shanghai Composite at 5,178, China had experienced a stock market boom that saw the Shanghai index rising in what seemed like a straight line by more than 135% in one year. The boom seemed […]
Read More…Please Mr. Lew do not “diminish” Alexander Hamilton
What can they possibly be thinking? This is not the sort of thing I normally write about, but I have to say that if I had any say in the matter I would most strenuously oppose removing or ‘diminishing” Alexander Hamilton’s portrait from the ten-dollar bill. He never made president, of course, but only George […]
Read More…Inverted balance sheets and doubling the financial bet
On Tuesday the National Bureau of Statistics released China’s 2014 GDP growth numbers and reported growth consistent with what the government has been widely promoting as the “new normal”. According to the preliminary estimation, the gross domestic product (GDP) of China was 63,646.3 billion yuan in 2014, an increase of 7.4 percent at comparable prices. […]
Read More…My reading of the FT on China’s “turning away from the dollar”
The Financial Times ran a very interesting article last week called “China: Turning away from the dollar”. It got a lot of attention, at least among China analysts, and I was asked several times by friends and clients for my response. The authors, James Kynge and Josh Noble, begin their article by noting that we […]
Read More…Zounds! Hacked again!
I apologize to those who have submitted comments but for the past nearly four weeks I have been unable to enter into my blog as editor, which means that I have been able neither to post new entries nor to approve comments. I finally regained control last night and tried to approve all the legitimate […]
Read More…The impact of reform on growth
I got a lot of feedback from my January 5 blog entry because of my argument that the implementation of the reforms proposed in the Third Plenum all but guarantees that growth rates in China will slow down. For that reason I thought it might make sense for me to explain a little more carefully […]
Read More…Monetary policy under financial repression
Following Paul Krugman’s lead I guess I can refer to this post as being “wonkish”. Much of it is based on my recent book Avoiding the Fall (Carnegie Endowment, September 2013). In order to understand much of what is happening in China I believe it is crucially important to understand how financial systems operate under conditions […]
Read More…Rebuilding the blog….
I apologize for being offline for so long but the Viagra salesmen were able to hack my site once again and make it impossible for me to approve comments, add new posts, or otherwise manage the site. Because my colleague working with me believes that there is malicious code imbedded in my blog that allows […]
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