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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.
By taking three steps to improve the United States’ trade imbalance and boost exports, President Obama and Congress can create three to four million jobs at no cost to the Federal Budget. First, the United States must, in effect, weaken the dollar by 10 to 20 percent—an action that would by itself produce one million [...]
The exit of long-time Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin reflects a profound conflict over economic policy between Kudrin and the almighty Vladimir Putin. Prime Minister Putin, who has announced his intention to run again for president in a cooked election, chose to throw fiscal conservatism and arduous economic reforms overboard, and Kudrin was no longer [...]
Addressing a rally at the obsolete Brent Spruce Bridge connecting Kentucky and Ohio, President Obama recently challenged Republican leaders to pass his American Jobs Act: “Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge. Help us rebuild America. … Pass this bill.” Good political theater, perhaps, but not effective economics. Neither House Speaker John Boehner [...]
The term “energy poverty” is used to describe the 1.6 billion people in the developing world who lack access to electricity or the more than 2 billion who still rely on biomass as their primary source of energy. This phenomenon presents a significant barrier to economic growth in poor countries. But data released last week [...]
Latvia held early parliamentary elections on September 17th, only one year after the last elections to parliament. The voting came after former President Valdis Zatlers called for a referendum on the dissolution of the parliament, because the parliament let one parliamentarian-cum-oligarch, Ainars Slesers, keep his parliamentary immunity in spite of prosecution for corruption. In July, [...]
Most of Europe has been engulfed by a systemic banking crisis for more than four years, even as policymakers and bankers themselves have striven to deny it. Even worse, the continuing banking system’s fragility is increasingly intertwined with the euro area’s sovereign debt crisis, as illustrated by successive patterns of contagion, from sovereigns to banks [...]
The euro area faces an existential crisis. After almost two years of drama, European sovereign debt problems and associated threats to the stability of European financial institutions continue to build. The euro and the European integration project confront “catastrophic risks,” in the words of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and time is running out. A [...]
After nine months of being used as a pawn in a partisan battle, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)—a small program that provides job search assistance and training to workers, firms, farmers, and fishermen hurt by globalization—is scheduled for a vote this week in the Senate. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been denied assistance since the [...]
It isn’t every month a US Treasury Secretary flies to Europe multiple times to meet with Europe’s top economic policymakers. So even if the Obama administration has an obvious own-interest in lining up a potential convenient external excuse for Europe, should the American economy continue to sputter during the accelerating election campaign, it is important [...]
All the discussion about including the renminbi in the Special Drawings Rights (SDR) basket established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a side-show or distraction with the real action being the conditional imminence of the renminbi’s rise. That is not a judgment, just a description of reality. Last week, the renminbi was in [...]