 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Sign up to receive automatic updates to RealTime Economic Issues Watch.
A website forum in which senior fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics discuss and debate their responses to global economic and financial developments as they occur each day and offer insights that others might overlook.
A number of economists and financial experts have begun suggesting that discussions of regulatory reform—at the G-20 summit meeting in mid-November and elsewhere—should be curtailed or postponed because the implied tightening of regulation could complicate the management and recovery from the financial and economic crisis. I think this view is overwrought. [...]
Congress will leave town this week without passing another stimulus package or deciding what to do about the failing auto industry. The only thing Congress could agree on was a second temporary extension of unemployment insurance. This extension and the extension passed earlier this year are mere band-aids on a program with serious problems. Given the prospect of a long and deep recession, it will only be a matter of time before Congress will need to take further action.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced earlier this week that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has succeeded in stabilizing the U.S. banking system. This unfortunately no longer appears to be the case.
As the financial crisis deepens, the world’s central banks and financial authorities have gained broad support for their efforts to reintroduce liquidity to the credit markets, get banks to lend again and bring down spreads and bond yields. But these sensible and indeed required steps to avoid a repeat of the [...]
Initial reactions to the G-20 summit are fairly positive. The communiqué and associated press conferences conveyed: (a) There was no open acrimony; (b) The body language was broadly supportive of countercyclical fiscal stimulus policies; And (c) there may now be a serious international regulatory agenda.
None of this is really new [...]