 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
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.
The latest economic data from France look bad. The strategy of keeping official growth forecasts high (despite the evidence) is coming under increasing pressure and there may be substantial revisions to the outlook in the pipeline. Once you break through to being more honest, there is some catching up [...]
We know there is going to be a large fiscal surge in the United States (the latest estimate is a stimulus of $675 billion to $775 billion, which is a bit lower than numbers previously floated). This will likely arrive as the US recession deepens and fears of deflation take [...]
According to the Rodong Sinmun, official organ of the Korean Workers Party, “The ‘Dollar Empire’ has crashed into the cellar, and the financial sector, economics sector, and of course the political sector, are all gasping for breath as they beg for foreign assistance.” The reason: astronomical expenditures on cruel, barbarous, blood-stained campaigns of mass murder to plunder Middle Eastern oil driven by Americas “limitless greed and aspiration to dominate the world” for which it will face an inevitable sentence of death.
The usual grounds for optimism these days is the fact that the Obama administration is clearly going to propose a big fiscal package with two components: a large conventional stimulus (spending plus tax cuts), and a big housing refinance scheme, in which the Treasury will potentially become the largest-ever [...]
The dollar is depreciating in eye-catching and headline-grabbing fashion. The Japanese authorities are signaling that they are prepared to intervene. The G-7 (remember them?) has the established role of coordinated intervention in major currency markets when things get out of hand. So where are they now and when will they come in?