In an attempt to reverse a recent, rapid deterioration of investor confidence, the government of Ireland today released new estimates of the costs of rescuing its sickened banking sector. You might want to sit down because the numbers are pretty ugly. Nationalized Anglo Irish Bank, the biggest source of investor concern, will require, in total, [...]
Protectionism has been the worst nightmare of policymakers since the earliest days of the financial crisis. It has become an article of faith among economists that protectionist policies during the 1930s exacerbated the Great Depression, and everyone knows full well that adopting similar practices today would have the same disastrous impact on the Great Recession. [...]
Asia’s march to greatness sometimes has an inevitable quality about it. The center of economic gravity is relentlessly shifting from West to East. China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s No.1 economy. India won’t be far behind. We’ve heard these types of predictions so many times that we’ve come to accept them as undeniable [...]
The air is rife with merger news. Southwest Airlines is bidding for Air Tran, Walmart is planning to buy Massmart Holdings of South Africa and Unilever just sealed a deal to acquire Alberto Culver at a 19% premium to Friday’s closing price. It almost feels like the Go-Go Eighties, with the Wall Street Journal struggling to squeeze all the [...]
French Fighting for the Right to Retire Relatively Young (AP) The French work force was doing what it does as well as anyone yesterday—going out on strike. Somewhere between one and three million workers (the police and the big union, CGT, disputed the totals) hit the streets to protest the plan by the government of [...]
I’d like to congratulate the United Nations for finally catching on to what the real world has known about alleviating poverty for decades: Poor people need good jobs. The U.N. Research Institute for Social Development released a report earlier this month called Combating Poverty and Inequality that assessed the progress made by policymakers around the [...]
Blockbuster Was Relying on a Drink Island to Revive Stores Back in April, months or years after lots of other people, I got the idea that there was no way video chain Blockbuster could avoid bankruptcy. So I went to talk to a few people about how the company got into its sorry situation and [...]
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero declared to The Wall Street Journal this week that the economic crisis in Europe has ended. “I believe that the debt crisis affecting Spain, and the euro zone in general, has passed,” Zapatero said. He probably hasn’t been watching the ongoing trials and tribulations of Ireland. Once the [...]
The Loan Dissenter: Kansas City Fed President Tom Hoenig (Nati Harnik/AP) Last month, economist Thomas Hoenig delivered a speech at a public meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, called Hard Choices. The normally mild-mannered Hoenig said the Fed’s recent policy of holding interest rates near zero was a “dangerous gamble.” He said he feared the moves of [...]
Recession Deals, Going, Going, Gone (Source: AP) Good news for everyone who has been out of work for months, facing foreclosure or generally struggling to make their bills: The recession is over. The bad news: It has been for a while. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the organization that officially designates when [...]
