“Financial Stability in Emerging Markets: Dealing with Global Liquidity”

That was the title of a conference in Beijing (October 21st), organized by the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) . I had the privileged of delivering a keynote speech. The conference agenda is here, and encompassed three sessions: Global Liquidity — Consequences and Policy Options; Dealing with International Capital Flows; and a panel forum on International Capital Flows and the International Monetary System.

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Links for 2011-10-23

Dave Altig and Patrick Higgins at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta have raised their estimate of 2011:Q3 real GDP growth from 1.4% as of the beginning of September to 3.2% currently.

Enterprise Products Partners and Enbridge Inc. announced plans to build a new pipeline from oversupplied Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast (hat tip: Jim Brown). I reviewed the great need for such a pipeline here, and this may be one way to get one built without having to wait forever for White House approval.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams reviews lessons from the last 3 years on the effects of unconventional monetary policy.

Michael Plante and Mine Yucel at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas review the evidence on the role of speculation in recent oil price moves.

Could monetary policy mitigate the real effects of oil shocks?

Michael Levi (hat tip:Marginal Revolution) and Jeremy Kahn are among those who recently rediscovered some earlier research by Ben Bernanke and others that concluded that the economic downturns that followed historical oil price shocks could have been avoided if the Fed had followed a more expansionary monetary policy at the time. Here I call attention to some subsequent research that took another look at their evidence and reached a different conclusion.

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Wealth Inequality: A Time Series Plot

Dismissing the plots of income inequality in previous posts [0] (related posts [1] [2]), an Econbrowser reader asks:

“Do you concur that measures of the wealth distribution have been mostly quiescent since the 1970s and that the distribution of wealth is more even today than it was in the 1940s (the peak for the US modern era)?”

Well, I think that this is an interesting question, and so I went a-searching for data. This is what I found, which led to my answer of “no”.

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