Economic Data

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…

The destructive quality of irredeemable credit, understood by some before the U.S. mortgage crash, obvious to more in its wake, was crystallized in the too-low, centrally controlled, interest rates that flushed a bacillus of fake money and…

Historical data shows conditions peaking in late winter to early spring and declining later in the year.

The focus on currency wars distracts from other and arguably more important issues. Much of coverage of the G20 statement focused on the foreign exchange market, but has missed what is likely an even more important story. The G20 have…

The core of the issue is not whether the country could see one, or even two, quarters of positive performance, but whether any faltering recovery will be sustained out into the future, through 2014 and beyond. It is here that all the old…

The European Union released figures for Q4 2012 GDP today and they were awful. GDP fell by 0.6% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the entire EU. Stock markets are getting clobbered on the news and the euro is selling off. This is not unexpected…

I’ll be watching a number of things in 2013 in order to get a better sense of what the future will bring. On January 22 Princeton University Press will be publishing my book, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road…

Of all of the elements of the US fiscal cliff, the most damaging from a consumer perspective is likely to be the increase in payroll taxes as it hits a broad swathe of consumers in the middle class. This was confirmed today via the release…

Last year, I started off the newsletter with a list of ten surprises for 2012 which I reviewed last month. I apologize for not having a similar list of ten surprises for 2013 yet. I think it is a good exercise to go through to hone one's…

Trade data for the US, Germany, Japan and China were released earlier today. While the US, Germany and China had robust export growth that caused their surpluses to swell, Japan's numbers showed weakness despite the recent drop in the value…