LONDON – The proposed sum for the recovery fund proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is small change in an era when politicians and central bankers conjure up trillions almost daily. But, if adopted, the proposal might be remembered as the moment when Europe became a genuine political federation. The ...

LONDON – Central bankers have been the first to recognize that the effectiveness of monetary policy in managing demand and stabilizing economic cycles has reached its limits. The problem is that many politicians and academic economists remain in denial. A mood of foreboding dominated this month's annual meetings of the International Monetary ...

LONDON – The UK's prime minister is probably right to think that suspending Parliament has made a last-minute Brexit deal more likely. Fortunately, there is also a decent chance that his quasi-dictatorial behavior will provoke a rapid parliamentary backlash that ends his political career. The long-running tragicomedy of the United ...

LONDON – Political betting markets now put the chance of a no-deal Brexit at roughly one-third. But, regardless of the reckless promises to Conservative Europhobes that made Boris Johnson prime minister, an orderly, negotiated Brexit will be the favored option for a political libertine whose only consistent principle has been inconsistency. ...

LONDON – Many economists have become convinced that a recession in the United States is now overdue, if not immediately then surely before the 2020 presidential election. But US recessions since the end of World War II have generally resulted from three causes, none of which is currently present. The US economy has entered its 11th year ...

LONDON – In a world where "nobody knows anything," investors may be no better than film-studio moguls at predicting the future. If so, then markets, instead of being predictive, become increasingly reactive, simply extrapolating recent events. If there is one useful conclusion that economists and investors can draw from the crazy year that ...

LONDON – Among the multiple existential challenges facing the European Union this year – refugees, populist politics, German-inspired austerity, government bankruptcy in Greece and perhaps Portugal – one crisis is well on its way to resolution. Britain will not vote to leave ...

LONDON – The US Federal Reserve is almost certain to start raising interest rates when the policy-setting Federal Open Markets Committee next meets, on December 16. How worried should businesses, investors, and policymakers around the world be about the end of near-zero interest rates and the start of the first monetary-tightening cycle ...

LONDON – One question has dominated the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting this year in Peru: Will China's economic downturn trigger a new financial crisis just as the world is putting the last one to bed? But the assumption underlying that question – that China is now the global economy's weakest link – is ...

LONDON – The US Federal Reserve's decision to delay an increase in interest rates should have come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Fed Chair Janet Yellen's comments. The Fed's decision merely confirmed that it is not indifferent to international financial stress, and that its risk-management approach remains ...

LONDON – Violent swings in oil prices are destabilizing economies and financial markets worldwide. When the oil price halved last year, from $110 to $55 a barrel, the cause was obvious: Saudi Arabia's decision to increase its share of the global oil market by expanding production. But what accounts for the further plunge in oil prices in the ...

LONDON – Now that Greek banks have reopened and the government has made scheduled payments to the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, does Greece's near-death experience mark the end of the euro crisis? The conventional answer is a clear no.
According to most economists and political commentators, the latest Greek ...

LONDON – The good news is that a Greek default, which has become more likely after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' provocative rejection of what he described as the "absurd" bailout offer by Greece's creditors, no longer poses a serious threat to the rest of Europe. The bad news is that Tsipras does not seem to ...

LONDON – Once again, Greece seems to have slipped the financial noose. By drawing on its holdings in an International Monetary Fund reserve account, it was able to repay €750 million ($851 million) – ironically to the IMF itself – just as the payment was falling due.
This brinkmanship is no accident. Since coming to power in January, the ...

The US dollar is hitting new 12-year highs almost daily, while the euro seems to be plunging inexorably to below dollar parity. Currency movements are often described as the most unpredictable of all financial variables; but recent events in foreign-exchange markets seem, for once, to have a fairly obvious explanation – one that almost ...

If one number determines the fate of the world economy, it is the price of a barrel of oil. Every global recession since 1970 has been preceded by at least a doubling of the oil price, and every time the oil price has fallen by half and stayed down for six months or so, a major acceleration of global growth has followed.Having fallen from $100 ...

This week's theatrical resignation threat by Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, combined with deep European anxiety about deflation, suggest that the euro crisis may be coming back. But a crisis is often an opportunity, and this is the hope now beginning to excite markets in the eurozone.
Investors and business leaders are asking ...

Why is the world economy still so weak and can anything more be done to accelerate growth? Six years after the near-collapse of the global financial system and more than five years into one of the strongest bull markets in history, the answer still baffles policymakers, investors and business leaders.
This week brought another slew ...

At last, the European Central Bank seems ready to inject some adrenalin into the moribund euro zone economy. After last week’s news conference, when European Central Bank President Mario Draghi strongly hinted that action would take place after the June 5 council meeting, there have been a host of interviews and leaks specifically describing ...

Can economists contribute anything useful to our understanding of politics, business and finance in the real world?

I raise this question having spent last weekend in Toronto at the annual conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a foundation created in 2009 in response to the failure of modern economics in the global financial crisis (whose board I currently chair). ...

The recent economic news has been about as investor-friendly as anyone could imagine.

It started with last week’s strong U.S. employment figures; continued through Tuesday’s reassuring International Monetary Fund forecasts, which put the probability of avoiding a global recession this year to 99.9 percent, and culminated in dovish Federal Reserve minutes, ...

When Janet Yellen chairs her first meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee Tuesday and Wednesday, she will be presented with a once-in-a-generation opportunity that even her predecessors in the world’s most powerful economic position have rarely enjoyed.

Not only can Yellen alter the guidance on interest rates with which the FOMC has been steering global financial markets. Beyond that she could do something far more profound and exciting: transform an entire generation’s way of thinking about economics, market forces and ...

Oscar Wilde described marriage as the triumph of hope over experience. In finance and geopolitics, by contrast, experience must always prevail over hope, and realism over wishful thinking.

A grim case in point is the confrontation between Russia and the West in Ukraine. What makes this conflict so dangerous is that U.S. and EU policy seems to be motivated entirely by hope and wishful thinking. Hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin will “see sense” — or ...

A severe slowdown in China is viewed as among the greatest risks facing the world economy this year, and Thursday’s dismal news on Chinese manufacturing output exacerbated these fears. But the really important news from Beijing pointed in the opposite direction: Bank lending in China, instead of slowing dramatically as many economists ...

This has been a banner week for the world economy, inspired largely by events in the United States.
In Washington, the first congressional testimony from Janet Yellen in her position as new Federal Reserve Board chairwoman reassured and impressed two notoriously petulant audiences: Tea Party congressmen, who had assembled a posse of ...

What has caused the sudden anxiety attack that overwhelmed financial markets after the New Year? We may find out the answer at 8.30 on Friday morning, Eastern Standard Time.

Almost all agree that the market turmoil has been linked to alarming events in several emerging economies — including Turkey, Thailand, Argentina and Ukraine — that has spilled over into concerns about more important economies, such as China, Russia, South Africa, Indonesia ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who retires this week as the world’s most powerful central banker, cannot be trusted.
Neither can Janet Yellen, who will succeed him this weekend at the Federal Reserve.
And neither can Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England; Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, or any of ...

“I have seen the future and it works,” said Lincoln Steffens, a left-wing American journalist, on returning from the Soviet Union in 1919. After a weekend in Venice at a seminar organized by the Italian ambassador to Britain, I found myself struck by the same thought, which is not exactly the reflection that the world’s most perfectly ...

Happy New Year! For the first time since 2008, we investors, economists and businesspeople say these words without irony. While last year was statistically disappointing, with global growth slowing slightly from 2012 and apparently belying the optimism expressed here last January, the verdict of financial markets and business sentiment has ...

Thanks goodness it’s over. Financial market behavior ahead of last night’s announcement by Ben Bernanke on a gradual reduction in U.S. monetary stimulus has been tedious and irritating, rather like listening to whining children in the back of the car on a long journey: “Daddy, are we there yet?” In fact, impatient whining about when the Fed ...

The muted market reaction to this week’s budget deal in Washington may initially seem like a disappointment. After all, uncertainty over government spending, debt and taxes has consistently emerged in business sentiment surveys as the biggest single factor holding back corporate investment and damaging financial confidence. Why then did ...

Nobody should be surprised that Wall Street hit new records this week. After all, the U.S. has just witnessed the end of a sensational hostage crisis that was threatening national security and undermining economic confidence — and even more sensationally, this was the second such crisis in ...

The U.S. budget battle was always likely to end in a Republican defeat and a rout for Tea Party firebrands; but the outcome has turned out to be even more dramatic: an unconditional surrender, instead of the negotiated ceasefire suggested here two weeks ago. Trying to spot historic turning points in real time is always risky, but the scale of ...

While the world is transfixed by the U.S. budget paralysis, fiscal policies have been moving in several other countries, most notably in Japan and Britain, with lessons for Washington and for other governments all over the world.

Let’s start with the bad news: Shinzo Abe’s decision to increase consumption taxes from 5 to 8 percent next April. This massive tax hike, to be followed by another increase in 2015, threatens to strangle Japan’s consumer-led growth from next year onwards, since Abe looks ...

Now that the worldwide panic over U.S. monetary policy has subsided, Washington is brewing another storm in a teacup: the budget and Obamacare battle that reaches a climax next Monday, followed by the debt limit vote required to prevent a mid-October Treasury default. The ultimate outcome of these crises is a foregone conclusion. As Senator ...

As the summer holidays wind down, the world is again moving into the financial Hurricane Season, which coincides uncannily with the meteorological hurricane season in the North Atlantic every autumn. Most great financial crises have occurred in the six weeks from late August to mid-October, for reasons I discussed in this column ...

On the way to my holiday in Italy this year, I had an epiphany about the state of the world economy. I stopped for lunch in the truly miraculous Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, where Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped cannon-balls from the Leaning Tower to test his theories of motion. A few years later, Galileo invented the telescope to ...

Margaret Thatcher used to say that “There is no alternative” to whatever policy she believed in. But there is always an alternative to banging your head against a brick wall — you can stop banging your head against a brick wall. The G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting in Moscow last weekend may have marked such a moment of revelation, when ...

The bull market in global equities that started in the dark days of early 2009 passed a historic milestone this week. When the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index closed on Monday at 1682.5, this did not just represent a new record high and a full recovery from the swoon that Wall Street suffered after Ben Bernanke’s “tapering” comments in late May. ...

Whenever Alan Greenspan was praised for delivering a clear message on U.S. monetary policy, he liked to reply something along the lines of: “If you think that, you have misunderstood what I said.” Ben Bernanke prefers the opposite approach. On May 22, he triggered one of biggest financial panics since 2008 by raising the possibility of ...

In the four weeks since Ben Bernanke first mentioned that the Federal Reserve Board might start to taper its program of quantitative easing (QE) later this year, more than $2 trillion was wiped off the value of global stock markets — and probably far more from the value of global bonds, which is harder ...

It’s cynical, manipulative and hypocritical – and it looks like it is going to work. How often do you hear a sentence like this, to describe a government initiative or economic policy? Not often enough.

The media and a surprisingly high proportion of business leaders, financiers and economic analysts seem to believe that policies which are dishonest, intellectually inconsistent or obviously self-interested in their motivation are ipso facto doomed to fail or to damage the ...

On Wednesday in Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke presented congressional testimony that repeated, virtually word for word, statements about U.S. monetary policy he has been making since last September.

The Federal Reserve, Bernanke said, would continue buying $85 billion of bonds monthly until it was confident of reducing unemployment to 6.5 percent. The scale of these purchases might be increased or diminished – but only if and when such shifts were warranted by economic ...

Here is a list of economic questions that have something in common. In a recession, should governments reduce budget deficits or increase them? Do 0 percent interest rates stimulate economic recovery or suppress it? Should welfare benefits be maintained or cut in response to high unemployment? Should depositors in failed banks be protected ...

Ronald Reagan had a catchphrase when faced with a crisis, especially a synthetic “crisis” of the kind Washington loves to concoct. He would call in the officials and media advisers rushing manically around the West Wing and calmly tell them: “Don’t just do something – stand there.” In this respect, as in several others, “No Drama Obama” seems ...