After a long tenure as the most interesting (if not always the most accurate) of Wall Street’s economic forecasters, Steve Roach started work Monday as Morgan Stanley’s Asia chairman. So it was a little weird to encounter him late in the afternoon in Grand Central Station, rushing for a train. Apparently he doesn’t move to Hong Kong until September.
On Friday, in his last missive as the investment bank’s chief economist, Roach looked back and, as he almost always does, worried a little about the future:
[T]hese past 25 years have been an era of powerful transitions – transitions from high to low inflation, from stagnant to rapid productivity growth, and from closed to open economies. Transitions, by definition, have a finite duration. A key challenge for the global economy and world financial markets is what happens after these transitions have run their course – when disinflation comes to an end, when the productivity revival has crested, and when globalization hits its structural limits in terms of import penetration in the developed world and investment-led growth in the developing world. Don’t get me wrong – a post-transition climate need not be characterized as a return to rapid inflation, stagnant productivity growth, or trade protectionism. The endgame could be considerably more benign – modest inflation, “adequate” productivity growth, and a leveling out of the global trade share of world GDP. While these outcomes offer less dynamism to the global economy than we have seen in recent years, they do not represent relapses to more problematic macro climates. At the same time, such post-transition scenarios may well deny world financial markets the high-octane fuel that has produced such spectacular results over the past 25 years.
A few minutes after I chatted with Roach at Grand Central, I saw Tea Leoni stepping out of a Town Car at the entrance to the NBC studios on 50th Street. I didn’t talk to her, and I know of no recent writings by her that I should be linking to.
Then, on the way home an hour or so later, I saw The Dread Alterman walking down Broadway. He appeared to be listening to his iPod, so I didn’t bug him. I will, however, link to his epic account of the Marty Peretz era at The New Republic, which is out today in The American Prospect. It’s a nice reminder that Alterman, while he sometimes seems mainly interested in counting the opinion columns in the front of Time, is actually an intellectual historian, and a pretty good one. In the article, he gives Peretz much credit for hiring Michael Kinsley and Hendrik Hertzberg back in the day, then berates him for just about everything the magazine has done since they left. A sample:
“Try, try very hard not to hire anybody who isn’t smarter than you, and wiser,” Peretz says he promised himself. In this, he notes, he succeeded. He might have added “and more liberal.” For in the days when the neoliberal Kinsley and old-fashioned social democrat Hertzberg traded off the magazine’s editorship, literary and political giants did indeed walk the TNR hallways. Just 28 and still in law school when he initially took over the magazine, Kinsley’s contrarian nature and inimitable example would prod not only The New Republic but an entire generation of pundits in the direction of Mickey Kaus/Jacob Weisberg–style smart-ass neoliberalism.