It Looks Like Everyone Owes Bernanke A Big Apology … Since the day the rally began in early 2009, basically they've always been wrong. The economy since the bottom has been characterized by steady, underwhelming improvement, and the only time the market has dived has been during periods when it looked like the economy might falter (most notably right after the 2011 debt ceiling brouhaha)...Read More

Bank of England new governor Carney makes fans in first week At the end of his first week at the Bank of England, Mark Carney appears to have impressed the markets, economists, and even a group of determined female protestors. Since the new governor got his feet under the desk on Monday morning, the FTSE 100 has risen around 6%. Economists welcomed the moves towards "forward guidance", o...Read More

Egypt needs elections, not generals … Mohamed Morsi's one-year rule of Egypt was disastrous. He ruled by fiat, alienated potential allies and failed to stabilize the country's spiraling economy. But a military coup is not an answer to Egypt's problems. It will exacerbate, not ease, Egypt's vast political divide. The Egyptian military's primary interest is maintaining its...Read More

The events that led to the Egyptian army's removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the street is not the same as an election. But it is an awesome manifestation of people power. The equivalent turnout in Britain would be around 13 million people. Just think about it for a moment. The army wouldn't i...Read More

China admits local govt debt levels unknown, could be higher than estimated … A senior Chinese official said on Friday that the government did not know precisely know how much debt local governments had built up and warned that it could be more than previous estimates. Estimates of local government debt range from Standard Chartered's 15 percent of the country's GDP at end-2012 to Cr...Read More

Carney Should Make the Bank of England an Innovator … Speculation that Mark Carney, who took charge at the Bank of England this week, might radically change U.K. monetary policy cooled in the months after his appointment was announced. No doubt, this softening of expectations was justified — the constraints of the office are tighter than the new governor and his admirers would like. It...Read More

Unprecedented Globalization … A couple of weeks ago I posted a chart showing the long-term trend of world trade in manufactures relative to world production. The paper I took the chart from, however, only went up to 2000. And I decided to update it for the next edition of Krugman Obstfeld Melitz. And it's pretty striking: You see the interwar trade decline; the growth in world trade afte...Read More

Delaying the Employer Mandate Requires Delaying All of Obamacare … The IRS has announced it will postpone the start date of Obamacare's "employer mandate" from 2014 to 2015. Most of the reaction has focused on how this move is an implicit acknowledgement that Obamacare is harmful, cannot work, and will prove a liability for Democrats going into the November 2014 elections. The...Read More

Libertarian Gary Johnson: 'this Independence Day feels different … Former Libertarian presidential hopeful Gary Johnson hopes you have a nice picnic, parade or BBQ to attend, and a flag to wave. But he is not delivering the typical feel-good Fourth of July message this year. "This Independence Day feels a little different," he says. "The news in recent weeks about the IRS...Read More

ElBaradei tops list to head Egypt government … Mohamed ElBaradei, a former U.N. nuclear agency chief, is favorite to head a transitional government in Egypt after the military overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Mursi, military, political and diplomatic sources said on Thursday. ElBaradei, 71, was mandated by the main alliance of liberal and left-wing parties, the National Salvation Front,...Read More

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was forced out of office Wednesday by the Egyptian military and opposition leaders, just a couple of hours after the Obama Administration voiced its first public doubts about Morsi's handling of the massive street protests that spread across the country in recent days. Egyptian Army Chief Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi took to state television to announce that the head o...Read More

Celebrity Economists Make Waves – At Work … Who are people turning to nowadays for business advice? Celebrity economists. Big-name experts on the economy like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Porter, Robert Reich and Muhammad Yunus feature prominently in a new ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal. – AP/WSJournalDominant Social Theme:...Read More

Mark Carney to review female representation on bank notes … Sir Winston Churchill will feature on the new £5 note to enter circulation in 2016 … Which woman should go on a banknote next? Bank of England governor Mark Carney will look at the women represented on banknotes by the end of July. Mr Carney said he believed that those chosen should represent the diversity of great Briti...Read More

Carney Has Already Proven Himself a Great Communicator … Mark Carney avoids trap that caught Ben Bernanke at the Fed Bank of England monetary policy committee takes cue from governor as interest rates and quantitative easing stay on hold … Bank of England governor Mark Carney is nothing if not a fast learner. Last month Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke illustrated how panicky the...Read More

Horror Film as Neocon Fantasy … In 2013 it would be politically incorrect to portray white conquerors mowing down non-whites (although that's still sometimes okay to do with Muslims), so we turn to the undead as a stand-in for the unwashed hordes who threatened us in the days of yore. Zombies are convenient, of course, because they are not necessarily specific to any particular race or c...Read More

As Mark Carney arrives at the Bank of England, are we seeing the end of QE? … Mark Carney votes for the first time on the Monetary Policy Committee … will be a seminal decision, albeit one the rest of the country won't discover until the minutes are published on July 17. The new Bank of England Governor has to choose whether to follow his predecessor Sir Mervyn King and call for mo...Read More

Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and others plan July 4 protest against NSA surveillance A large coalition of civil rights and privacy groups and potentially thousands of websites will stage protests on the Fourth of July to protest surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency. As part of the Restore the Fourth campaign, many website members of the 30,000-member Internet Defense League pl...Read More

A failure to care about the public's money … There has been a breach of governance at the BBC that has 'put public trust at risk' – a serious charge that urgently needs addressing … Over the past three years, 150 managers received a total of £25 million in severance payments – and 10 of the most senior executives accounted for more than £5 million of...Read More

Wonkbook: Is this the laziest Congress ever? On Monday, simply by doing nothing, they allowed the interest rate on student loans to double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That might be permissible if they were busy with more important things, like inventing a cure for cancer that's also a source of endless clean energy. But they're not even working this week. The 112th Congress passed 22...Read More

The Origin Of 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Milton Friedman … No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970. As the leader of the Chicago school of economics, and the winner of Nobel Prize in Economics...Read More