Economic Development and Diversification in Africa

Angola tries to reduces its dependence on Oil

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/27/angola-hopes-to-turn-steel-into-gold-as-oil-hammers-economy.html

Ethiopia – A Rising African Star?

http://assets1c.milkeninstitute.org/assets/Publication/MIReview/PDF/15-25MR69.pdf

Nigeria – Tough Road Ahead

http://assets1c.milkeninstitute.org/assets/Publication/MIReview/PDF/12-21-MR66.pdf

WSJ on Premature Deindustrialization -

http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-poor-countries-well-worn-path-to-development-turns-rocky-1448374298

Demographics and the Global Economy

Demographic Upheaval

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/03/pdf/bloom.pdf

Demographics and the Global Economy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12068068/Mapped-how-a-demographic-time-bomb-will-transform-the-global-economy.html

A WSJ special feature on global demographics:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-demographics-rule-the-global-economy-1448203724

WSJ piece - Graying Japan Tries to Embrace the Golden Years

http://www.wsj.com/articles/graying-japan-tries-to-embrace-the-golden-years-1448808028

Adair Turner’s on the benefits of slowing global population growth rates:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/adair-turner-makes-the-economic-case-for-demographic-stabilization

A look at the demographics of Africa:

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21679781-fertility-rates-falling-more-slowly-anywhere-else-africa-faces-population

WSJ on Africa's Demographic Challenges -

http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-a-growing-africa-hope-mingles-with-fear-of-the-future-1448632865

Much of the increase in the global population in the 21^st century is expected to occur in Africa.

Why Concerns Regarding Demographic Shifts and Population Decline May be Overdone –

The WSJ reports – Robots Take On More Elaborate Tasks Amid Worker Shortage

http://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-take-on-more-elaborate-tasks-amid-worker-shortage-1448291203

“The same can be said for many potential applications of robots, 3-D printers and other forms of automation, ranging from the assembly of myriad consumer goods to caring for the elderly. Though progress has been incremental so far, in coming decades the gains could add up to a significant reduction in the need for human workers in many fields.”

Technology and Financial Sector Jobs

Technology and Wall Street Jobs

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html

Related:

http://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2016/02/financial-traders-in-modern-world.html

The Fed, Monetary Policy and Inflation

An interesting piece on Fed’s monetary policy mandate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/upshot/feds-3-mandates-price-stability-jobs-and-wall-street.html

Inflation - Goods versus Service Inflation

http://bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-26/stuff-keeps-getting-cheaper

Inflation Expectations

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/02/26/dont-panic-over-falling-inflation-expectations/

China and the Global Economy – A Long-Term Perspective

Why China will be the most important economy in the world

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/02/27/china-will-bounce-back-and-continue-to-drive-global-growth-for-d/

Is China more capitalistic than the West?

An FT story notes –

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76e8a3f8-db8c-11e5-98fd-06d75973fe09.html

“With 32 newly minted super-rich in the past year, China’s capital has become the billionaire capital of the world, the latest Hurun Global Rich List says, with a total of 100 to the Big Apple’s 95....
China’s growing clout in the rankings is even starker in the world of female “self-made” billionaires, according to Hurun, where the country dominates with 93 of the global total of 124.”

Barter Economy and Money - Historical Perspective

An interesting piece from The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/

Low Energy Prices – Growing Economic Impact

Natural gas market – price wars

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/02/25/energy-price-war-spreads-to-gas-as-us-shale-storms-global-market/

A costly battle roiling global oil markets:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/02/23/opec-has-failed-to-stop-us-shale-revolution-admits-energy-watchd/

Saudi Arabia cuts subsidies

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/saudi-arabia-is-reeling-from-falling-oil-prices-and-it-could-get-much-worse/2016/02/25/0dee71a6-d1e2-11e5-90d3-34c2c42653ac_story.html

Impact of low oil prices on bond markets

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-26/bond-vigilantes-slap-oil-ceos-with-junk-tag-on-258-billion-debt

Small scale producers - Fight to survive
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/business/energy-environment/falling-oil-prices-force-cutbacks-at-smallest-companies.html

Demographics of Innovation in the US

A new report notes –

http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf

“The study finds that immigrants comprise a large and vital component of U.S. innovation, with 35.5 percent of U.S. innovators born outside the United States. Women represent just 12 percent of U.S. innovators, and U.S.-born minorities (including Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other ethnicities) represent just 8 percent of U.S.-born innovators. Contrary to popular conceptions about precocious college dropouts with big ideas, U.S. innovators actually tend to be experienced and highly educated—and most hold advanced degrees in the fields of science and technology.”

Infographic: http://www2.itif.org/2016-itif-demographics-infographic.pdf

World's Best Cities

The best cities to live in - international rankings:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/23/the-worlds-greatest-cities-are-not-actually-that-great-to-live-in/

Reemergence of Keynesian Economics

Robert Skidelsky on Keynes’s General Theory at 80

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/keynesian-policy-at-80-economic-recovery-by-robert-skidelsky-2016-02

“Two final reflections suggest a renewed, if more modest, role for Keynesian economics. An even bigger shock to the pre-2008 orthodoxy than the collapse itself was the revelation of the corrupt power of the financial system and the extent to which post-crash governments had allowed their policies to be scripted by the bankers. To control financial markets in the interests of full employment and social justice lies squarely in the Keynesian tradition.

Second, for new generations of students, Keynes’s relevance may lie less in his specific remedies for unemployment than in his criticism of his profession for modeling on the basis of unreal assumptions. Students of economics eager to escape from the skeletal world of optimizing agents into one of fully-rounded humans, set in their histories, cultures, and institutions will find Keynes’s economics inherently sympathetic. That is why I expect Keynes to be a living presence 20 years from now, on the centenary of the General Theory, and well beyond.”

Financial Traders in the Modern World

An interesting NYT piece - A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-breed-of-trader-on-wall-street-coders-with-a-phd.html

“And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital.

In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop.
Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon).”

The Other Wal Mart Effect

History Lessons: The 15th Century ‘Great Bullion Famine’

An interesting historical comparison:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-22/it-s-the-15th-century-all-over-again

---

Another Interesting History Lesson – German Banking Crisis of 1931 and Regulatory Reforms
http://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/02/05/from-berlin-to-basel-what-can-1930s-germany-teach-us-about-banking-regulation/

Macroeconomic Stability and Financial Reforms in Emerging Markets

The Fourth C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2016: Financial Sector Reforms in India: The Past and the Future by Dr Raghuram Rajan (RBI Governor)

http://www.ncaer.org/uploads/photo-gallery/files/1454409598Dr%20Rajan_CDDLSpeech.PDF

Brexit and the British Pound

Sharp drop of the Pound suggests market wariness of a potential UK exit from the EU:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12167981/Pound-suffers-biggest-drop-in-almost-a-year-as-Boris-Johnson-sparks-Brexit-fears.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/first-britain-then-denmark-betting-on-brexit-risk-1456117261 [gated]

China’s Nouveau Rich

China's Tech Sector Generates Rapid Wealth:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/tech-millionaires-keep-china-s-wealth-machine-humming-for-banks

An interesting piece from The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/chinas-rich-kids-head-west

“While China’s poor still inhabit a developing-world economy, a recent report found that the country now has more dollar billionaires than the U.S. does. “What is happening in China constitutes one of the most rapid emergences of wealth stratification in human history,” Jeffrey Winters, a politics professor at Northwestern University, told me. Winters, the author of the book “Oligarchy,” pointed out that China is one of a small number of countries—Russia is the other notable example—where extreme wealth stratification was eliminated in a Communist revolution and then later reemerged. As in Russia, the sudden formation of a new oligarchy in China means that there are many super-rich people who are unfamiliar with the ways in which more entrenched aristocracies quietly protect their wealth. “No matter the culture or age, old money knows from long experience that it is far safer to be secluded and less seen,” Winters said. But new money, as Thorstein Veblen theorized, asserts itself through conspicuous consumption.”

International Economics - Updates

Russian Economy – Learning to Deal with Low Oil Prices

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-22/how-putin-is-surviving-lost-oil-revenue

Related:

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/future-development/posts/2015/11/03-ruble-depreciation-russia-hansl

SWFs Dump Equities

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/sovereign-wealth-funds-seen-selling-404-billion-of-equities

Investment Decline in Germany

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/germany-isn-t-investing-the-way-it-used-to-and-that-s-a-problem

Persistent Low Growth Challenges Central Bankers

http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2016/feb/21/central-bankers-on-the-defensive-as-weird-policy-becomes-even-weirder

Low Yields and the Bond Market

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/fear-and-loathing-of-negative-yield-debt-bond-trader-s-dilemma

America - The Big Picture

A fascinating and ultimately optimistic narrative of general conditions in modern America by James Fallows of The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/how-america-is-putting-itself-back-together/426882/

Dangers Posed by an Economically Illiterate Electorate

Roger Lowenstein on Trump’s Dangerous Economic Agenda:

http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/donald-trump-wrong-economy/

How Sanders, Trump Threaten Market Confidence by Greg Ip of Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sanders-trump-threaten-market-confidence-1455730736

Update: Romer and Romer critique of Sander's plan:
http://ineteconomics.org/uploads/general/romer-and-romer-evaluation-of-friedman1.pdf

Leading Indicators and Recession Predictions

A great piece from Stephen Mihm:

http://bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-19/bear-markets-don-t-predict-recessions-but-liquidity-might

Update - Some US States more vulnerable than others http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/recession-already-reality-in-spots-from-west-virginia-to-wyoming

Technical analysis:

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/12/recession-might-be-in-the-cards-if-historys-a-guide-analyst.html

Global Economic Update – Advanced Economies

OECD’s latest economic projections

http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/OECD-Interim-Economic-Outlook-February-2016.pdf

Felix Martin on Global Economic Conditions
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2016/02/coming-storm

Are policymakers in advanced economies running out of ammo?

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21693205-policymakers-rich-economies-need-consider-some-radical-approaches-tackling-next

UK’s unusually strong labor market

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12165312/Reasons-to-hope-the-good-news-about-jobs-will-keep-on-coming.html

Gig economy jobs

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/02/18/gig-economy-attracts-many-workers-few-full-time-jobs/

Law and Liberty/Privacy

The fascinating implications of the Apple encryption case:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-writ-precedent-in-the-apple-case

An Optimistic Take on Technology and Labor/Jobs

An interesting piece from economist Michael Jones - Yes, the robots will steal our jobs. And that’s fine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/17/yes-the-robots-will-steal-our-jobs-and-thats-fine/

Related:

http://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2016/02/automation-ai-and-uncertain-future-for.html

http://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2015/04/technology-labor-augmenting-or-labor.html

Negative Rates - A Failure of Fiscal Policy?

Negative Rates – Overburdened Monetary Policy and the Failure of Fiscal Policy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12160280/Negative-interest-rates-are-a-gigantic-fiscal-failure.html

Update:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12165844/How-negative-interest-rates-marked-the-end-of-central-bank-dominance.html

Trade and Globalization

Two interesting articles from WSJ:

South Carolina GOP Voters Feel the Benefits of Free Trade—but Also the Scars

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-carolina-gop-voters-feel-the-benefits-of-free-tradebut-also-the-scars-1455663542

“Few states have been more nimble than South Carolina in adjusting to global competition. The state turned the loss of 80,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1980 into part of its pitch to foreign manufacturers and U.S. exporters that need a big pool of workers to staff new car, tire and aerospace plants. Even some Chinese textile makers, once the scourge of the state’s business establishment, are setting up beachheads in South Carolina, which leads the nation in percentage of workers employed by foreign companies—8.4% in 2013.

Yet the benefits are unevenly spread and have gone disproportionately to the college-educated in larger population centers”

A Tale of Two Countries: How Dollar’s Strength Distorts Coffee Market

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tale-of-2-countries-how-dollars-strength-distorts-coffee-market-1455705003

Impact of Low Oil Prices

Risky Oil-Sector Loans Held by European Banks – Time to Worry?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-banks-oil-idUSKCN0VQ1P0

No More Cushy Jobs for Saudis

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/17/young-saudis-see-cushy-jobs-vanish-along-with-nations-oil-wealth.html

Agreements to Curtail Oil Production - Doomed to Fail

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/17/oil-production-freeze-deal-is-questionable.html

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/17/investing/oil-freeze-saudi-russia-iran/index.html

Leaning Against the Wind – 'The Big Long'

A fascinating piece from Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-17/the-big-long-making-a-killing-in-market-everyone-left-for-dead

“First came the big short. Then, for Milan Patel, came the big long.

With the financial crisis raging in January 2009, Patel and a handful of colleagues hit upon the trade of their life: They would put up their own money to buy the complex securities that everyone else was dumping. By the time they sold, they’d racked up returns of as much as 800 percent, turning bonds trading at pennies into millions of pounds. The twist is that much of what they were buying -- toxic asset-backed debt-- was the kind of paper they’d loaded onto the books of their employer, HBOS Plc. Those securities helped sink an institution founded the year after the Bank of England.

If investors like Michael Burry shot to fame and fortune for their bets against the crowd -- now celebrated in “The Big Short” -- Patel’s tale is a timely reminder of keeping your nerve when all around you are losing theirs.”

'Too Big To Fail' Banks

Newly appointed President of Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Neel Kashkari’s important speech on “To Big To Fail” Banks:

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/~/media/files/news_events/pres/kashkari-ending-tbtf-02-16-2016.pdf