capital investment

The serious debate has not been about whether or not China’s collapse is imminent. The disagreement was whether or not investment misallocation and the repression of household income growth were fundamental to the Chinese growth model. The…

What if automation means that what capitalists really want is a very small, highly skilled workforce to control the robots that do all the work? What if paying people enough to live on simply is not cost-effective compared to the running…

The real challenges for China, if you believe in the social capital constraint, are not about maintaining high rates of growth in the short term but rather of raising the levels of social capital in China. This is much more difficult and…

One of the reasons that it is been so hard for a lot of analysts, even trained economists, to understand the imbalances that were at the root of the current crisis is that we too easily confuse national savings with household savings. By…

I have been arguing for several years that once China begins the adjustment process, which I expect to characterize the ten-year period of the current administration, growth rates must slow significantly. My expectation for long-term growth…

Amazon, Apple, and Samsung, three of the biggest names in the technology space, have reported this week. In all three cases, there were gaps in the earnings reports and the earnings outlooks. For me, however, Samsung's report was the best…

Quick note here on the US and the UK to change things up a bit from the Cyprus obsession.

According to an analysis by Reuters, small and medium-sized banks in the US have started to take on risk as the squeeze in net interest margins is beginning to hurt profitability. The goal is to boost returns despite the low-interest rate…

Now the bad times are back, Paul Krugman is trying resuscitate IS-LM, a model published by John Hicks in 1937 that seeks to explain the relationship between interest rates, and real output in goods and services and money markets. I argue…

The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important…