Note: This post is based on the author’s paper “Asia’s Changing Position in Global Financial Reform” presented at the joint conference “Asian Capital Market Development and Integration: Challenges and Opportunities” co-organized by the Asian Development Bank, Korea Capital Markets Institute, and the Peterson Institute, in Seoul on October 24, 2012. Before 2007–08, most global financial [...]

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The euro area’s efforts to stabilize its financial picture got a boost from several developments in the last week, as the effects of the outright monetary transactions (OMT) announced last summer by the European Central Bank (ECB) continues to take hold. At the European Union Council, for example, leaders confirmed their political commitment to a [...]

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Lithuania held the first round of its parliamentary elections on October 14, setting in motion the likely ouster of the center-right government of Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius by a center-left government. The left won heavily, with a combined total of 46 percent of the proportional vote against 23 percent. The voting was generally seen as [...]

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The leaders of euro area countries made an unprecedented commitment when they issued a statement on June 29 starting with the words, “We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns.” This statement officially acknowledged their intention to break the “doom loop” of mutually reinforcing deterioration of credit conditions [...]

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The October World Economic Outlook of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued semi-annually, contains an ambitious chapter 3, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: 100 Years of Dealing with Public Debt Overhangs.” It is an empirical study of developed countries that have had public debt of more than 100 percent of GDP in the [...]

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Waiting for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to ask for lending assistance to Spain is enough to make you ask: Where are the bond vigilantes when you need them? The verbal intervention by Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), on July 26, followed by the ECB’s new Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in [...]

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Back in 1992, Congress enacted the Iraq-Iran Non-Proliferation Act—the first in a long parade of Congressional acts and Presidential executive orders designed to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Reinforced by extensive cooperation from US allies, the most recent measure, the Threat Reduction Act of August 2012, has imposed crippling sanctions on Iran’s banking system and oil [...]

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Hardly a day goes by without a reminder of the high youth unemployment rates in Greece, Spain, Italy, and other parts of the European periphery, which are in excess of 50 percent. Sometimes the reminders are in the form of rants by economists or pundits about the moral deficiency of euro area demands for austerity [...]

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After a quiet few weeks, political pressures are rising again in Europe. Pictures of petrol bombs exploding among riot police officers in Athens have returned to global television and Bloomberg screens, and news reports suggest mounting support for the rightist Golden Dawn party, bringing back questions about the durability of the summer stabilization in the [...]

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In his 2010 book, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister Gordon Brown took great pride in his fiscal stimulus in early 2009. His intention, as that of all well-meaning Keynesians, was laudably to increase output. However, the United Kingdom has persistently underperformed in terms [...]

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