OK, many of you have asked but I knew that I had to put in an explanation for my continued absence here when my mother in Turkey complained that she missed the "postcards" from me on the blog. I am alive and well. But here are two reasons why this space will not be updated frequently over the...

This just in from the highest authority in the land: [T]he fact is that Larry Summers right now is very comfortable making arguments, often quite passionately, that Bob Reich used to be making when he was in the Clinton White House.

The IMF's partially-released World Economic Outlook makes two points which significantly alter my priors with respect to the speed and vigor of the recovery in the advanced nations--for the worse. First, the IMF authors find that recessions created by the bursting of financial bubbles are diff...

A long-standing debate between libertarians and others concerns the extent to which a state is needed to enforce cooperative rules. Many libertarians argue that informal, self-sustaining agreements can achieve desirable outcomes even without the state acting as a third-party enforcer. See here f...

A lunch time talk by Niall Ferguson suggests a grim picture. Even if the world economy is not headed towards a 1930s-style catastrophe, it will remain mired in a "depression" like that experience in the 1870s, argues Ferguson, with long-term stagnation and deflation. This will be a bad time fo...

Gordon Hanson has set up a Shadow Committee on U.S. Trade Policy, and has asked several economists to respond to specific questions. Here is the one I was charged with: Rightly or wrongly, some have interpreted Krugman’s recent Nobel address, which has gotten considerable play in Washington, as...

Gordon Hanson has set up a Shadow Committee on U.S. Trade Policy, and has asked several economists to respond to specific questions. Here is the one I was charged with: Rightly or wrongly, some have interpreted Krugman’s recent Nobel address, which has gotten considerable play in Washington, as...

Arvind Subramanian is onto something: he asks why the crisis has spawned a debate on capitalism in the advanced countries, but not in the developing nations. As he notes, there is very little clamor for rolling back markets once one moves to the periphery of global capitalism: Surprisingly, in...

Arvind Subramanian is onto something: he asks why the crisis has spawned a debate on capitalism in the advanced countries, but not in the developing nations. As he notes, there is very little clamor for rolling back markets once one moves to the periphery of global capitalism: Surprisingly, in...

The Greek crisis is yet another manifestation of the political trilemma of the world economy: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Read the rest here.