The mainstream mythology says that free trade needs a government-like structure on an international level in order to thrive. Two papers from the NBER seriously challenge that idea, not on the level of theory, but by the experience thus far with the World Trade Organization.
NEW $20 BILL INTRODUCED: Fed Chairman Greenspan says new design will “make things tougher for counterfeiters.”
After several days in which the Treasury Secretary claimed that a low dollar is great, the White House spokesman now says US policy is unchanged: the US wants a strong dollar. Maybe, just maybe, the strength or weakness of the dollar is more influenced by supply and demand than the statements of government officials.
The “dinar’s surge and the dollar’s plunge have wiped out a big part of the purchasing power of the $20 emergency payments American administrators have been handing out,” says the New York Times.
The “rankings will mirror the interests of the groups that aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts, hobbyists and, often, the crackpots,” says Geoffrey Nunberg in the New York Times.
Surprise! The Fed Isn’t Just Greenspan ”The committee is divided,” said Alan S. Blinder, the vice chairman of the Fed in the mid-1990’s and now an economics professor at Princeton. “And you can see why. It’s a tough call right now.”
Time to have the state regulate this dangerous combination, says Bill Thompson for the BBC.
“One of the most enduring political images of the last generation is the one of Arthur Laffer, an obscure economist from the University of Southern California, scribbling a parabola on a cocktail napkin one night in the late 1970’s to illustrate how tax cuts would lead to more government revenue, not less,” writes David E. Rosenbaum in the New York Times.
More Fed Keynesianism from Vice-Chairman Roger Ferguson: ”In the quarters ahead and as noted at the conclusion of our policy meeting earlier this month, the Federal Reserve has to guard against further declines from the already low prevailing level of inflation.
