Jul 20th, 2010
In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble. The most common question is whether or not there is a threshold of debt (measured, say, against total GDP) above which [...]
Jun 24th, 2010
With the PBoC’s currency announcement last Saturday and the surge (!) in the value of RMB on Monday (all very kindly timed to add zest to my meetings this week in Boston, New York, and Washington), you would assume that today’s entry would be all about the RMB and the effect of the PBoC announcement. [...]
May 7th, 2010
“How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fix,” asked William Butler Yeats plaintively in the midst of the political upheavals of the early 1930s, “on Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics?” Well, love and beauty in the Beijing spring weather notwithstanding, it is hard once again not to fix attention on [...]
Mar 2nd, 2010
After such a long entry last week I thought I would spare my readers and do something much briefer. A few days ago I read a good article (“Stuck on Neutral”) about Japan in the August 18 issue of the Economist. You can find the article on the Economist website if you are a premium [...]
Dec 26th, 2009
Since it is the Christmas holiday, and I am spending the week in southern Spain with my family, I have not been focusing too heavily on economic data and have instead been reading lots of different stuff, including Frederic Wakeman´s excellent The Fall of Imperial China, about the transition from the Qing, especially the late [...]
The third down week in a row had the SSE Composite finishing with a 1.1% loss Thursday and a 1.9% loss Friday, to close at 1840. Checking the historical data provided by Bloomberg indicates that we have to go back nearly two years, to November 2006, right around the beginning of the ferocious Chinese bull [...]
The market continued its losing streak with the SSE Composite dropping 64 points to close at 2093, down 3.0% for the day, with financial institutions and property developers once again leading the way. During the trading day my student Shang Ning sent me the following (slightly edited) email: The PBoC issued 1-year bills, at [...]
The Olympic opening ceremony Friday was truly a spectacular event and left a lot of people here, at least among my students, with a sense of nearly euphoric pride. I watched the ceremony on television at D22, my music club near Peking University, and during the ceremony I received dozens of phone messages from current [...]
Jan 30th, 2008
There is a longish and much-discussed article in this Sunday’s New York Times (“Waving goodbye to hegemony”) by Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation, which strikes me as a sort of compendium of a lot of fashionable and muddled thinking about the evolving geopolitical order. [...]