Two Defining Economic Battles
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on August 2nd, 2010 4:32 am by HL
Two Defining Economic Battles
Irwin Stelzer, The Weekly Standard
There are two battles going on that will influence how the economy performs for the rest of this year. The first is a battle for attention between the general economic news and the profits performance of America’s leading companies. The second is a battle between austerity advocates and the more-stimulus-please-sir, crowd. In a sense, this latter war is between Europe and Britain, on the one side, and America on the other.Start with the first battle. The news about the economy has diminished hope that the economic recovery will be rapid and robust. A…
Central Asia’s Great (Double) Game
Thomas Friedman, New York Times
The trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It's actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: "If you are in a poker game and you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you." Thomas L. Friedman In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that's us. Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, we are paying Pakistan's Army and intelligence…
Defining Prosperity Down
Paul Krugman, New York Times
I'm starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers "” but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think. Paul Krugman Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That's bad. But what's worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn't care "” that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal. And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility…
