In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, gave his explanation of what’s wrong with peak oil. Here’s why I don’t find his analysis altogether convincing.
Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery
From the preface to Lost Decades, published today (9/19) by W.W. Norton:
The United States … lost the first decade of the
twenty-first century to an ill-conceived boom and a subsequent bust.
It is in danger of losing another decade to an incomplete recovery
and economic stagnation.
In order to not lose the decade to come, the United States will
have to bring order to financial disarray, gain control of a burgeoning
burden of debt, and re-create the conditions for sound economic
growth and social progress. None of this will be easy. The tasks are
made more difficult by the fact, which we have learned to our alarm,
that all too many policymakers and observers cling to the failed
notions that got the country into such trouble in the first place. If
Americans do not learn from this painful episode, and from others
like it, they will condemn the nation to another lost decade.. (p. xvi).
Guest Contribution: “Europe’s Lehman Moment”
Today, we’re fortunate to have a guest contribution by Jeffry Frieden, Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard University, and coauthor of Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery. This article first appeared on Reuter’s Opinion.
Europe’s Lehman Moment
By Jeffry Frieden
Europe is in the midst of its variant of the great debt crisis that hit the United States in 2008. Fears abound that if things go wrong, the continent will face its own “Lehman moment” — a recurrence of the sheer panic that hit American and world markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008. How did Europe arrive at this dire strait? What are its options? What is likely to happen?
The Wrong Track, in Figures
Mike Rosenberg (Bloomberg) notes that, when viewing the policy mix from the perspective of fiscal and financial conditions, we are on the following path, even as there is a large amount of slack in the economy [0]:
The Fall 2011 World Economic Outlook
The analytic chapters were released yesterday.
What could America be good at?
A vision of what American economic growth over the next decade could look like might also help us address our immediate economic problems.
Investment Behavior and Policy Implications
Over the weekend, both Professors Barro and Mankiw wrote on investment in the New York Times. As Modeled Behavior observed, the focus on business fixed investment (BFI) or nonresidential investment was somewhat odd because BFI behavior had not been particularly anomalous in the recovery. Here, I extend upon that analysis, and draw some policy implications.
What do low government bond yields signify?
Brad DeLong and
Tyler Cowen point to an interesting exchange in the Financial Times.
We Can All Be Like Texas!
From Fort Worth Star Telegram:
As the Texas Forest Service battles what may be the state’s most destructive wildfire outbreak ever, state lawmakers are facing criticism that they have has taken a penny-wise-pound-foolish approach to funding the agency.
Recovery, or Replaying 1937 (and 2008)?
The President laid out a series of policy measures in today’s speech which are, by textbook standards, entirely reasonable. And yet, many have been declared by the pundits to be DOA. I’ll leave the assessment of political feasibility to others, but the very fact that these specific measures [0] are so reasonable by textbook standards makes me wonder if we have in fact experienced technological regress in our politico-economic discourse. Maybe those shocks in RBC models are just the fact that so many individuals with influence never took an intermediate macro course, let alone an economics course [1] (I highly recommend Robert Hall and John Taylor’s Macroeconomics, or the later editions, by Hall and David Papell).