WASHINGTON, DC: Tax time in the United States — the dreaded mid-April deadline for filing annual income-tax forms — has come and gone. The system, Americans have been reminded, has become painfully complex, with many a loophole through which one (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Europe's policy elite — the people who call the shots at the national and eurozone level — are in serious trouble. They have mismanaged their way into a deep crisis, betraying all of the lofty promises of unity and prosperity issued (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Among the fundamental principles of any functioning justice system is the following: Don't lie to a judge or falsify documents submitted to a court, or you will go to jail. Breaking an oath to tell the truth is perjury, and lying in (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement are right to argue that the big banks have never properly been investigated for the mortgage origination, aggregation, and securitization behavior that was central to the financial (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: According to Voltaire, the Roman Empire fell “because all things fall.” It is hard to argue with this as a general statement about decline: nothing lasts forever. But it is also not very useful. In thinking, for example, about (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: America's Tea Party has a simple fiscal message: the United States is broke. This is factually incorrect — US government securities remain one of the safest investments in the world — but the claim serves the purpose of dramatizing (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Leading United States Congressmen are determined to provoke a showdown with the Obama administration over the federal government's debt ceiling. Ordinarily, you might expect House Republicans to blink at this stage of the (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: European leaders are convinced that bank capital is “expensive,” in the sense that raising capital requirements would slow economic growth. But the latest developments in the Greek crisis show that the exact opposite is true — it's (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: It is increasingly common to hear prominent American and European central bankers proclaim, with respect to the crisis of 2008-2010, the following verdict: “We did well.” Their view is that the various government actions to support (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: It has become fashionable among Washington insiders — Democrats and Republicans alike — to throw up their hands and say: We ultimately face a major budget crisis in the United States, particularly as rising health-care costs increase (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: The United States continues to be riven by heated debate about the causes of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Is government to blame for what went wrong, and, if so, in what sense?
In December, the Republican minority on the (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington are suddenly falling over themselves to agree on the need for major tax cuts — affecting not just middle-class Americans, but also very rich people (both living and when they die). Does (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: The world is on the brink of a nasty confrontation over exchange rates — now spilling over to affect trade policy (America's flirtation with protectionism), attitudes towards capital flows (new restrictions in Brazil, Thailand, and (...)
STOCKHOLM/CAIRO: Sweden's Electrolux has agreed in principle to buy Egypt's Olympic Group, the biggest appliance maker in the Middle East and North Africa, in a push to capture growth in emerging markets.
The world's second-biggest maker of (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Today's conventional view of the eurozone is that the crisis is over — the intense, often existential concern earlier this year about the common currency's future has been assuaged, and everything now is back under control.
This (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: The United States has a significant budget deficit, likely to be $1.3 trillion (10 percent of GDP) this year, and the long-term forecasts are worrying. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO, the leading nonpartisan (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Just over a hundred years ago, the United States led the world in terms of rethinking how big business worked — and when the power of such firms should be constrained. In retrospect, the breakthrough legislation — not just for the (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: America's financial sector has shown renewed strength in recent months — political strength, that is — by undermining most of the sensible proposals for banking reform that remain on the table. If we are still making any progress at (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: The world economy faces a major problem: the largest banks in the United States remain "too big to fail, meaning that if one or more of them were in serious trouble, they would be saved by government action - because the consequences (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Kazakhstan may be far removed from the euro zone, but its recent economic experiences are highly relevant to the euro's current travails. As the euro zone struggles with debt crises and austerity in its weaker members, Kazakhstan is (...)
WASHINGTON, DC: Traditionally, "you should go to the IMF was not something you would say to friendly neighbors and close allies. Over the past few decades, the International Monetary Fund became associated with excessive fiscal austerity, extreme (...)