Category: World Economy

Lessons from Sweden

I linked last weekend to former Swedish Finance Minister’s Bo Lundgren’s appearance on the Marian Finucane show.

Lundgren also appeared recently before the TARP Congressional Oversight Committee, chaired by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren and his written testimony was the basis for the section on Sweden in the committee’s latest report. Here’s a webpage containing the written testimony of Lundgren and three other experts on other banking crises (Great Depression, 1980s S&L and 1990’s Japan) who all appeared before the committee at the same time.

The webpage also has full video of this meeting. The experts delivered short verbal testimony (Lundgren’s starts about 14 minutes in) and about 40 minutes in there is a question and answer session. Prof. Warren’s opening line of questioning about arguments against nationalisation was of particular interest to yours truly but the whole session is really useful.

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Worrying about the wrong problem

At a time when the world economy is contracting at Great Depression rates, you wouldn’t think that policy makers would be worried about inflation.

Financial Crisis Reading

The financial crisis has been going on long enough now that we are starting to see a lot of serious research and policy papers addressing the various issues that the crisis has raised.

This material may be a bit more complicated than most of the reports this blog usually links to but I think some of our readers may appreciate getting a sense of the stuff that we’re reading in trying to understand what’s going on and where we should be heading.

So, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading in between my nationalisation blogging …

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1929 vs 2008

Barry Eichengreen and I have a short piece on Vox comparing the two global depressions that began in 1929 and 2008. Hopefully this one will not last as long as the one 80 years ago.

The G20 London Summit

The prospects for the Irish economy are very sensitive to the resumption of global growth.  The VoxEU website provides some ‘instant’ analytical responses to the London Summit, including essays by some of the key UK civil servants involved in organising the summit:  the link is here.

I will be answering reader questions about the G20 summit on Monday at this website.