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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.
Senators are chomping down hard on Apple’s tax returns, trying to paint the company as Peck’s Bad Boy of corporate taxation. The lawmakers’ appetite has been whetted by a congressional investigation showing that the company avoided billions in taxes by setting up a complex web of global subsidiaries, some of them with no employees but [...]
On June 20, 2012, the Federal Reserve System’s Federal Open Market Committee extinguished the last shred of doubt as to whether it intends to achieve its mandated objectives. Despite a substantial markdown of an already inadequate forecast, the Fed did not take any actions that would make it possible to achieve either of its objectives [...]
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 [...]
As the epicenter of the global financial crisis has migrated from the US financial system in 2008 to the “submerging economies” in Europe, so also has the need for innovative solutions moved from Washington and New York to Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin. This is appropriate because it was naïve German Landesbankers, irresponsible European real estate [...]
Early Friday I went through the G-20 communiqué for the Wall Street Journal; a marked up copy is available online. It is hard to imagine how the summit could have gone any worse for the US Treasury and the president. The spin machine is now working overtime—and you’ll see big efforts to get more positive [...]
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Treasury Secretary Geithner—and Secretary of State Clinton—meet with a high-level Chinese delegation. According to official previews (i.e., the apparent contents of background briefings given to wire services), the economic topics are China’s concerns about the value of the dollar (i.e., their investments in the U.S.) and the amount [...]
The Treasury’s efforts to detoxify banks’ balance sheets have been a flop, to put it bluntly. Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds were initially earmarked to purchase banks’ bad assets, but confusion about finding the right price led to the plan’s abandonment. And now the much-touted Public Private Investment Partnership (PPIP), a program that would [...]
Buried in the late wire news on Friday, June 26—and therefore barely registering in the newspapers over the weekend—the Treasury announced the rules for pricing its option to buy shares in banks that participated in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department said the banks will make the first offer for the warrants. [...]
On his China visit, Secretary Geithner is immediately on the defensive. The language he is using on the Chinese policy of exchange rate undervaluation-through-intervention is the mildest available. And the commitment he is making, in terms of bringing down the US deficit, which we all favor, is an extraordinary thing to put numbers on in [...]
I hope it works. The financial stability plan presented on March 23 by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could be a part of the solution because it would remove some of the bad assets from the banks’ balance sheets and put some capital into the banks. The Treasury is clearly trying clever tactics to avoid going [...]