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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.
Editor’s Note: On April 16 the Executive Directors of the World Bank selected Dr. Jim Yong Kim as President for a five-year term beginning on July 1, 2012. A decision on choosing the next president of the World Bank is expected this week—perhaps as early as Monday. The Obama administration nominated Jim Yong Kim, president [...]
Near-term China investment decisions and US trade and economic policymaking are influenced by competing views of China’s longer-term outlook. Yet economic models of China’s long-term growth are shaky, debatable and hence few in number. Official statements from China’s leadership about long-term expectations, and more importantly about the composition of long-term economic growth, are even more [...]
Even as headlines remain dominated by the euro area crisis, the financial world is transforming itself along multiple other dimensions. One intriguing but so far little-noticed development is the gradual shift in the role of global financial standard setters, which are becoming more assertive in looking at how their standards are adopted and implemented around [...]
On December 8, at its next governing council meeting, the European Central Bank (ECB) should reduce its interest rates by one percentage point to 25 basis points. Anything less would amount to dereliction of the ECB’s duty to the euro area economy. The euro area faces the deepest economic and financial crisis since the exchange [...]
A common American assumption has been that the US economy would recover earlier and faster than that of the European Union. Therefore, the preliminary results for the second quarter of 2009, which showed that Germany and France grew by 0.3 percent over the first quarter of 2009, delivered a surprise. Well, this should not have [...]
In January, we calculated the likely impact of the global economic crisis by comparing the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) growth forecast for the crisis years with the average growth in the precrisis period of 2005–07. Given the release of new growth forecasts, we update our exercise here, but focus on the forecast for 2009. Three [...]
The current consensus view (e.g., as seen in the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects) is that we are having a serious downturn, with annualized growth for the fourth quarter in the United States at minus 4 percent or worse. But the consensus is that a recovery will be underway by mid-2009 in the United States [...]
One of the many urgent matters confronting the Obama administration is an action agenda for the G-20 economic summit meeting in April to be hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.1 At their first summit in November, the G-20 leaders declared that their next meeting should focus primarily on an overhaul of global financial markets and [...]
The IMF is signalling that it will further revise down its global growth forecast. This is after cutting the forecast sharply in October and again in November. Their latest published view is growth in 2009 will be 2.2 percent year-on-year, and 2.4 percent fourth quarter on fourth quarter. This view is dated November 6, 2008, [...]
Ten days before the opening of the G-20 heads-of-government meeting in Washington, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a revised forecast for global growth, released last Thursday, that has been widely interpreted as merely confirming that the world economy is slowing down. (And fast—it is remarkable to knock nearly a percentage point off the global growth projection, just a month after the last forecast went final.) But the forecast can also be read as a reflection of the Fund’s exhortation to fiscal expansion and, among some observers, as an indication of where some participants in the G-20 process may be headed.