THOUGHT LEADERS

Anatomy of the Global Economy

J. Bradford DeLong

Is a new global reserve currency needed? Do central banks need to be reigned in? Will health-care reform help or hinder efforts to control government budgets? Will the stimulus packages implemented to counteract the financial crisis of 2008 consign the world to a future of slow growth?

RECENT COMMENTARIES

FEATURED COMMENTARIES

Is Fiscal Stimulus Pointless?

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2010-02-26

The Harvard economist Robert Barro, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recently made an intelligent argument against America’s fiscal stimulus. But Barro misreads how his own evidence applies to the current situation in the US, and he wrongly dismisses the importance of the timing of government borrowing.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 6553

America’s Employment Dilemma

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2010-01-27

Some countries – China, for example – implemented job-creation policies a year ago that relied on boosting demand for goods and services, and are now reaping the benefits in higher employment. Other countries, like the US, did not, and now face the need to fight unemployment directly, through government job programs or tax credits to businesses that hire new workers.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 1 Read: 4959

The Fairness of Financial Rescue

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-12-29

Financial bailouts are understandably controversial, because they reward those who bet on risky assets. But a policy that leaves owners of risky financial assets impoverished is a policy that shuts down dynamism in the real economy.... read

Comments: 2 Recommended: 0 Read: 8897

Why Are Good Policies Bad Politics?

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-11-27

From the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year, the policies followed by the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Bush and Obama administrations have been sound and helpful. But they have also been politically unpopular with Americans, owing to opponents' extraordinary intellectual and political dishonesty, which the press refuses to see.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 6222

Slouching Toward Sanity

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-10-28

Economic policy in the aftermath of the financial crisis hasn't been ideal, especially in the US, where banks that were on the brink of collapse are back to business-as-usual, raking in profits and opposing urgently needed reforms. Nevertheless, economic policy has been good enough to prevent an inexorable slide into a 1930's-style depression.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 2 Read: 30709

The Anti-History Boys

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-09-28

When modern economic historians explain why the world is currently in the grips of a financial crisis and a deep economic downturn, they point to a long train of similar bubbles, crashes, crises, and recessions. Macroeconomists, by contrast, either profess ignorance or offer models that are utterly implausible.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 5676

Bernanke’s the One

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-08-26

As the re-appointment of Ben Bernanke has once again deminstrated, it is more remarkable for a US president not to reappoint a Fed chairman named by the opposite party than to reappoint one who wishes it. But even if Bernanke were not now the incumbent, he would be one of the best possible choices for the position.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 5711

Conservative Interventionism

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-07-27

Conservatives around the world, especially in the US, have bitterly opposed the massive upsurge in government intervention since the start of the financial and economic crisis. But almost everything that governments have done has followed a policy path that is nearly 200 years old, dating back to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 7112

Sympathy for Greenspan

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-06-26

Many observers believe that Alan Greenspan’s decision in 2001-2004 to push and keep nominal US interest rates very low in order to keep the economy near full employment led to today's crisis by fueling a housing bubble. But there were plenty of other mistakes that generated the catastrophe that faces us today.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 7840

The Hidden Purposes of High Finance	J. Bradford DeLong
High finance, which enables us to save, accumulate, and diversify our wealth, is based on the delusion that our investments are secure and liquid. Moreover, that delusion is what makes possible another purpose of high finance: indulgence of our love of gambling. ... read

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Depression Economics

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2008-12-26

A decade ago, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, wrote a little book entitled The Return of Depression Economics. It sank like a stone, but now it's back – in a revised and expanded edition – and, sadly, this time Krugman's timing is perfect.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 14630

Is Inflation the Right Battle?

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2008-08-28

The Federal Reserve and other central banks are coming under growing pressure to rein in rapid price growth. But headline inflation numbers are the only indication that rising inflation is a problem, or even a reality, and there is no sign anywhere of a wage-price spiral.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 16775

The Knife’s-Edge Economy

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2008-07-29

The fact that the US has not slid into a full-blown recession proves that the late Rudi Dornbusch was right that macroeconomic imbalances can last for longer than economists believe possible. But, given the magnitude of the chaos on the financial side of the US economy, widespread nationalization and liquidations are inevitable if confidence is not restored soon.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 16433

The Weak Dollar's Impossible Strength

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2003-09-19

Once upon a time, until 1997, America's current account deficit was relatively small--just 1% of GDP. Since then, the deficit has widened dramatically, to 2.7% of GDP in 1999, 3.5% in 2001, and an estimated 4.7% this year. Expect more of the same in 2004, when the current account deficit should reach 5.1% of GDP, despite forecasts that the US economy will grow significantly faster than most of its trading partners. ... read

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The Roots of Islamic Backwardness

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2003-05-27

The war in Iraq is over. But the battle to transform the economies of the Middle East--the only hope of preventing fanaticism from claiming a generation of young unemployed Arabs and Iranians--is only beginning. ... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 32178

Slouching Toward Sanity

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2009-10-28

Comments: 1 Recommended: 2 Read: 30709

The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2003-03-31

The UN recently revised its population projections. Some 6.3 billion people now live on Earth. If fertility rates in relatively poor countries continue to follow the trends set by today's relatively rich countries, we are within shouting distance of the world's maximum population-9-10 billion-to be reached in 2050-2100. ... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 28548

America’s Opposing Futures

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2005-09-16

I recently learned something interesting: American international finance economists and American domestically oriented macroeconomists have very different – indeed, opposing – views of the likely consequences of America’s huge current-account deficit. International finance economists see a financial crisis as likely, followed by a painful and perhaps prolonged recession in the United States. Domestically oriented macroeconomists, by contrast, see a forthcoming fall in the value of the dollar not as a crisis, but as an opportunity to accelerate growth.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 26495

The False Promise of Private Pensions

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2006-01-17

One of the strangest claims made in the debates about social insurance now roiling the world’s richest countries is the that government-funded defined-benefit pension programs (such as America’s Social Security system) are outmoded. These programs were fine, the argument goes, for the industrial economy of the Great Depression and the post-World War II generation, but they have become obsolete in today’s high-tech, networked, post-industrial economy.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 26246

Houses in the Air

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2005-08-24

Over the past six months, attention and worry have shifted from America’s enormous trade deficit to its surging property markets and real-estate bubble. At least two of the reasons for high – and rising – home prices in the United States are well understood. What remains highly uncertain, however, is whether an obviously overheating market can be cooled without sending America, and its main trading partners around the world, into an economic tailspin.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 25532

For Whom America’s Bell Tolls

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2005-10-26

These days the Chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Ben Bernanke, likes to talk about a “global savings glut” that has produced astonishingly low real interest rates around the world. But that is the wrong way to look at it. ... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 25522

Economists’ New World Order

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2005-05-17

Most academic economics rely on concepts laid down at the beginning of the twentieth century by the British economist Alfred Marshall, who said that “nature does not make leaps.” Yet we economists find ourselves increasingly disturbed by the apparent inadequacy of the neo-Marshallian toolkit that we have built to explain our world.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 24689

Europe’s Free Riders	J. Bradford DeLong
In the United States, individual states that follow unsound fiscal policies face a penalty. Their bonds sell at a discount relative to those of better-managed individual states. The higher debt service they must pay serves – to some degree – as a form of discipline against the temptation to spend now and pay later. ... read
Semi-Rational Exuberance	J. Bradford DeLong
In 1996, Yale economist Robert Shiller looked around, considered the historical record, and concluded that the American stock market was overvalued. In the past, whenever price-earnings ratios were high, future long-run stock returns were low. But now prices on the broad index of the S&P 500 stood at 29 times the average of the past decade's earnings. ... read

AUTHOR INFO

J. Bradford DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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THOUGHT LEADERS

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MIND AND MATTER

SPECIAL SERIES

PROJECT SYNDICATE

THOUGHT LEADERS

Anatomy of the Global Economy

J. Bradford DeLong

Is Fiscal Stimulus Pointless?

America’s Employment Dilemma

The Fairness of Financial Rescue

Why Are Good Policies Bad Politics?

Slouching Toward Sanity

The Anti-History Boys

Bernanke’s the One

Conservative Interventionism

Sympathy for Greenspan

Depression Economics

Is Inflation the Right Battle?

The Knife’s-Edge Economy

The Weak Dollar's Impossible Strength

The Roots of Islamic Backwardness

Slouching Toward Sanity

The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?

America’s Opposing Futures

The False Promise of Private Pensions

Houses in the Air

For Whom America’s Bell Tolls

Economists’ New World Order

AUTHOR INFO

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