Harold James
Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.
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2010-01-27
| While former US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker provided the central inspiration for Barack Obama’s recent proposal for overhauling banking, he has also been a prominent critic of the dangers of currency volatility. Returning to fixed exchange rates would run counter to almost every argument of modern economics, but, at a moment when we are looking to the past for financial solutions, it is no longer unthinkable.... read |
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2010-01-05
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From banks’ perspective, the most obvious lesson of the financial crisis was the need for a strong national government to bear the potential costs of a rescue. It is no longer best to be where the most favorable regulatory regime prevails, but to be where the state has the deepest pockets.... read |
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2009-12-07
| During the past quarter-century, but especially in the five years before 2008, the world revolved around the American consumer - and American-style consumerism. But consumerism, with its reliance on radical, debt-fueled individualism, is no longer sustainable, particularly given that satisfaction from buying objects is short-lived and requires continued repetition.... read |
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2009-12-04
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Every ten years or so, we think that a particular model of growth is so broken that it cannot be resurrected. The world needed to be rethought in 1979, 1989, 1998, and 2008, with each wave of collapse breeding a greater degree of disillusion about particular institutions.... read |
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2009-11-04
| Currency chaos is back, highlighting demands for a revised international monetary order. The rapid decline of the dollar and the pound, but also of the renminbi – now more firmly tied to the dollar than ever – is fanning tensions, while some ghosts of the 1930’s also have returned, particularly the fear that competitive devaluation is creating unfair trade advantages. ... read |
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2009-09-28
| Princeton -- If anyone wanted evidence that we are not in the mental and political world of the interwar Great Depression, the German election result and its outcome – a stable government of the center-right - should be a clincher. In interwar Germany, the Depression destroyed German democracy and led to the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists; in today’s Germany, the most severe economic crisis since the Second World War produced the reelection of Frau Merkel. ... read |
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2009-09-04
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Thanks to automation, the “Monday morning car” – caused by early and error-prone production runs of new models – is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Its equivalent in the financial world should, and will, meet the same fate.... read |
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2009-08-04
| The global financial crisis is reaching a bottom, and yet political frustration is growing, because the low point of the collapse seems to offer a last opportunity to promote dramatic change, and that opportunity may be missed. In fact, missing the opportunity may well be more likely than not.... read |
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2009-07-03
| German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has taken a peculiarly aggressive line in attacking budget deficits and loose monetary policy worldwide and repudiating them at home. But, while that stance resonates deeply with German voters, it makes no sense economically, particularly given Germany's commitment to European integration.... read |
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Who is to Blame?
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Harold James 
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Now that the economic crisis looks less threatening (at least for the moment), an ever more encompassing blame game is unfolding. But, because we are not sure quite who and what should be unmasked, the search for culprits has become like the late medieval and early modern search for witches: a way of making sense of a disorderly and hostile universe.... read
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2009-02-04
| There is a danger that in the push to nationalize banks as a consequence of the current financial crisis, governments will see it as their duty to implement strategies. Indeed, the strategic vision of a bank shaping a country's economic fortunes is as flawed as was the idea of central economic planning.
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2003-09-18
| Faced by uncertain re-election prospects, and worried about job losses, US President George W. Bush has begun to blame other countries, sending his Treasury Secretary to demand that they raise their exchange rates in order to make foreign goods more expensive for American consumers. That was John Snow's mission on his recent trip to China, but his goal was nothing new. Two of Snow's predecessors, John Connally and James Baker, followed a similar quest for politically desirable exchange rates. ... read |
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2006-03-20
| Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” If that is true, what should we think of today’s mounting economic nationalism, sometimes euphemistically described as “economic patriotism”?... read |
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2005-07-29
| The defeat of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty in referendums in France and the Netherlands has, it seems, given rise to a new consensus that further enlargement of the Union should be slowed down, or even stopped. Advocates of this position see EU voters as terrified by the consequences of the May 2004 enlargement of the EU, when eight formerly communist states joined, and angry that they were not consulted about it. ... read |
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2008-09-09
| PRINCETON – Ten years after its birth, Google is threatening to re-open the “Browser Wars” of the 1990’s, when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer eliminated its rival, Netscape’s Navigator. This time, however, it is Google’s Chrome that promises to transform the economics underlying the entire software industry, and not only because of its technical innovation in linking very different kinds of software to an Internet browser. In doing so it eliminates the need for a program such as Windows, which previously controlled access to every kind of software.... read |
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2008-09-18
| PRINCETON – Worried investors and policymakers are becoming obsessed with Great Depression analogies. But the lesson of 1931 is only in part financial or economic. The 1931 crisis was so big and so destructive because it was a financial drama that played out on a geo-political stage.... read |
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2005-04-14
| Anti-Japanese riots across China have heightened tensions in Asia. Indeed China-mania, a mixture of hopes, but mostly fears, is sweeping the world due to China’s rapid economic rise. Should the world really be more fearful than hopeful?... read |
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2004-12-09
| The People’s Bank of China and the Bank of Japan – as well as other central banks in Asia – are in trouble. They have accumulated vast foreign exchange reserves, estimated at more than $2 trillion. The problem is that almost all of it is in US dollars – a currency that is rapidly losing its value.... read |
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2008-10-02
| Great financial wealth has always been intimately related to the world of art, from Renaissance Florence to J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Frick. But, as the recent auction of works by Damian Hirst showed, when financial bubbles burst, acquiring art is no longer aimed at proving one's discernment to the broad public, but at securing an alternative store of value.... read |
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2004-04-14
| In the war of values between America and much of the world, corporate governance plays a big role. Different visions of how capitalism is run both reflect and in some cases fuel resentment of the US. In the 1990's, it looked as if the rest of the world wanted to do business the American way, with active capital markets and company bosses responding to shareholder interests. This Americanization was often described simply as "globalization."... read |
