savings

By Michael Pettis This post was originally published at China Financial Markets at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website According to a May 2020 CNN article, one consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is that “Americans…

The magnitude of the revision is eye-catching. And my inner sceptic wonders how the initial data reads could have got it so wrong.

This report was the first under a major revision to reporting of US economic data. The personal savings rate stood out.

Personal interest income will rise as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Banks will be slow to raise rates on deposits and on CDs. Nevertheless, as the Fed raises rates, this is a problem.

We are only seven months into Donald Trump’s presidency. And I think we can call it a failure. I’ll have a lot more to say on that momentarily. But I want to flag this as not being a dealbreaker for the US or global economy because people…

Underconsumption is the term we’re now using to describe the thesis that we are living in a world of excess supply. The novelty here - as I pointed out yesterday - is not that the world is oversupplied - and therefore lacking in developed…

Yesterday’s post on the failure of Japan’s monetary policy experiment drew some favourable commentary from a prominent macroeconomist that I want to run by you. The gist of his insight is that we have long been living in an age of an excess…

The last few days have made clear that monetary policy is having less and less impact as time goes along.In particular, the latest salvos from the Bank of Japan smack of desperation, as if BOJ Governor Kuroda has decided to throw everything…

The global economy is an economic system in which any country’s domestic economy is inextricably linked to other economies through the balance of payments mechanisms. The ability to place events within their global context is consequently…

Yesterday was a big conference day in Washington, D.C., with the IMF and World Bank meeting and with the Brookings Institution holding an event featuring the Greek and German finance ministers. While I attended the Brookings event, the…