Quick links to a few items I found of interest:
That’s the title of a piece my colleague Andrew Reschovsky has in the Fall La Follette Policy Report. With the admission of failure by the Supercommittee, it’s important to recall the basic choices facing the Nation.
From the CEA’s report “The Economic Impact of Recent Temporary Unemployment Insurance Extensions” released earlier today.
[Corrections made 11am Pacific]
“Getting the Balance Right: Transitioning Out of Sustained Current Account Surpluses” by Abdul Abiad, Daniel Leigh and Marco Terrones:
This chapter examines the experiences of economies
that ended large, sustained current account surpluses
through policy actions such as exchange rate appreciation
or macroeconomic stimulus. It subjects these
historical episodes to statistical analysis and provides a
narrative account of five specific transitions, examining
economic performance and identifying key factors that
explain various growth outcomes.
From “The Global Financial Crisis: Explaining Cross-Country Differences in the Output Impact,” IMF WP 09/280, by Pelin Berkmen, Gaston Gelos, Robert Rennhack, and James P. Walsh:
We provide one of the first attempts at explaining the differences in the crisis impact across
developing countries and emerging markets. Using cross-country regressions to explain the
factors driving growth forecast revisions after the eruption of the global crisis, we find that a
small set of variables explain a large share of the variation in growth revisions. …
Torsten Slok has a whole set of interesting pictures, two of which are particularly relevant in thinking about the US fiscal situation as compared to other advanced countries.
In several previous posts, I’ve emphasized the importance of future US consumption behavior in determining whether the global imbalances shrink, or revert to their pre-crisis configuration. [0] [1] [2] An IMF SPN by Jaewoo Lee, Pau Rabanal, and Damiano Sandri weighs in on the question of consumption. From the executive summary:
Jeffry Frieden, Professor of Government at Harvard, has a new Council of Foreign Relations working paper “Global Imbalances, National Rebalancing, and the Political Economy of Recovery” :
Global macroeconomic imbalances — massive borrowing by some countries and massive lending by others — drove the financial boom and bubble that eventually burst into the current crisis. There is now nearly universal agreement that such imbalances cannot be sustained, and that the former deficit and surplus nations need to move toward macroeconomic balance.