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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
On Wednesday afternoon, April 27, 2011, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave the first scheduled press conference by a Federal Reserve chairman immediately following a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Chairman Bernanke was sure footed and appeared not to be surprised by any of the questions. He answered most of the questions [...]
The uprising that led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak has created considerable uncertainty over the future of economic policies and reforms in Egypt. Will the political transition lead to a reform-minded government or a populist one that will try to undo the recent economic reforms undertaken by the Mubarak regime? There are certainly [...]
Last month, in a Washington Post outlook piece, I argued that if handled adroitly, the triple crisis facing Japan could be used to modernize the country’s politics. The government’s response to the disaster has been anything but adroit, and the opportunity to use the crisis to propel the nation forward is slipping away. In the [...]
On September 25, the G-20 leaders, meeting in Pittsburgh, launched their "framework that lays out the policies and the way we act together to generate strong, sustainable and balanced global growth." The success of this effort will define the success (or failure) of the G-20 in the post-crisis period. Will the framework be regarded as [...]
While much commentary in recent days have been focused on Standard & Poor’s (S&P) “shot across the US Congressional bow” with its negative outlook on US federal debt, it was actually euro area policymakers who received the most serious recent “market reminder” about the still perilous state of their plan to stabilize euro area peripheral [...]
Over the past year, the international financial community has revisited the complex issues raised by international capital flows and policies affecting them. Collective attention is appropriate because the flows, and actual or possible tightening of controls on them, create externalities for many countries. While not all of the attention to this topic over the past [...]
As we discussed last week, there were rumblings from the House International Affairs Committee about the treatment of the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the context of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) legislation, with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca) likening it to a "slave labor camp" and Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) and eight co-sponsors introducing [...]
The Independent Commission on Banking, set up last year by the newly elected UK government and chaired by Oxford economist John Vickers, published its much-awaited interim report on reform options for British banking on April 11. The policy proposals, to be confirmed in a final report in September, are a significant milestone not only for [...]
As disaster relief operations proceed in Japan, ongoing problems in power generation are expected to extend into the fall, if not beyond. Japan is facing as much as a 15 gigawatt (GW) electricity shortage when demand ramps up in the summer. Supply may be increased by 5GW primarily by bringing power generating plants currently under [...]
Despite the budget deal to keep the government running for the rest of the fiscal year, the United States remains at a profound impasse over its long-term public finances, with fiscal deficits lingering around 10 percent of the gross domestic product. Early in the financial crisis, presidential chief of staff Rahm Emanuel made the much-quoted [...]