On April 24, the Australian central bank announced that it would raise the proportion of its reserves devoted to Chinese financial assets from 0% to 5%, likely among the highest such allocations among world central banks.  Will other major central banks follow suit? Read more »

Benn’s new book The Battle of Bretton Woods has been called “the gold standard on its topic” by the New York Times, “a triumph of economic and diplomatic history” by the Financial Times, and “a superb history” by the Wall Street Journal.  But Eric Rauchway is having none of it.  He’s dinged the book twice now, its only two negative reviews—first for the IMF’s Finance & Development and then, in an extended dance remix version, for the TLS. Read more »

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank meets on May 2, with a possible rate cut in the offing. Yet a rate cut is not the no-brainer the Bank’s critics often suggest, as today’s Geo-Graphic shows.

The ECB’s official inflation-rate target is “below, but close to, 2%.” Both Portugal and Greece have inflation under 1% , but the transmission mechanism from ECB rates to business borrowing rates in those two countries has been virtually severed by the crisis. In short, they need a rate cut, but the ECB can’t deliver them one. Read more »

Paul Krugman recently dismissed concerns about America’s large international debt.  “America’s debtor position,” he writes, “isn’t actually that deep, because of capital gains.” Read more »

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi has promised to do “whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” and the bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions initiative last September, aimed at pulling down crisis-country bond rates, no doubt calmed market fears of a eurozone breakup. But whereas eurozone sovereign bond spreads have narrowed, the gap in real economic performance – particularly unemployment – between the best and worst performers, as shown in today’s Geo-Graphic, has continued to grow precipitously. Compare this to the United States, which has a fiscal and banking union as well as a monetary one. There, jumps in unemployment rate dispersion across states caused by financial and other shocks are reversed in relatively short order. Read more »

President Obama has proposed increasing the federal hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00, pointing out that 19 states already have minimum wages in excess of $7.25.  Only one state, however, Washington, has a minimum wage above $9.

So what impact would this have? Read more »

China has since 1994 operated some form of currency peg, harder or softer, between its yuan and the U.S. dollar. While China’s state-run Xinhua news agency has in recent years railed against U.S. management of the dollar, and has called for “a new, stable, and secured global reserve currency,” this week’s Geo-Graphic illustrates why China has little incentive to press for such a thing. Read more »

Big-name economists have been lining up to show their support for yet another target-based approach to monetary policy making: nominal gross domestic product level (NGDP) targeting. The basic idea is that a central bank should aim to stabilize GDP, unadjusted for inflation, at around 4.5% as a means of stabilizing aggregate demand and avoiding recessions. NGDP targeting having once been the intellectual stomping ground of economists on the right (notably Scott Sumner), its newest supporters come overwhelmingly from the left (such as Christy Romer). Read more »

In 2011, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that “there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. . . . to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” France in Mali is now a case in point; the Obama administration is providing only grudging assistance to an under-resourced French intervention.  As the small upper right figure in today’s Geo-Graphic shows, France has very little of the vehicular equipment necessary to prosecute the Mali operation—less than 5% of what the U.S. has in stock. Read more »

Since its creation after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, membership of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has grown from 29 countries to 188.  Representation, in terms of votes and quotas, has also become less connected with the relative weights of each country in the global economy.  As today’s Geo-Graphic shows, China would be by far the biggest beneficiary of an IMF voting reallocation based purely on gross domestic product, gaining eight percentage points.  What is much less well known, however, is that the United States would be the second biggest beneficiary, well above third-place Japan and fourth-place Brazil.  As the United States already has enough votes to wield unique veto power, this would have little practical effect on its already enormous influence.  But it does explain why the United States has been consistently more aligned with the so-called BRIC developing nations on IMF reform than with its fellow rich nations in Europe. Read more »