CERF Blog
Dan Hamilton & Sean Liu As expected, China’s 2013 second quarter economic growth slowed, recording 7.6 percent compared with 7.7 percent in quarter 1. This data was released July 15th. This is a real growth rate that is a comparison with the same quarter in the prior year. China’s government provides a production-side breakdown of… Read more
Here are two facts about China: Real estate values declined 27 Percent last month. Inflation is increasing. Their economic growth has slowed a bit, but it is still really high at 9.7, at least by the official numbers. Still, China’s leaders have a problem. Inflation can eventually create disastrous problems, but eliminating it would require… Read more
People are getting excited because China’s economy is expected to soon exceed the United States economy in size. They seem to think this is bad. Here’s an example. This is really a stupid thing to worry about, perhaps even a really stupid thing to worry about. China has a population of 1.34 billion, almost 20… Read more
The question has merit, but I came to it by a roundabout process. I was thinking about how our savings rate is low and falling. After all, we have lots of reasons to save: We’ve lost huge amounts of wealth over the past couple of years, and many people, especially Baby Boomers anticipating retirement, are… Read more
Some countries do not follow Milton Friedman’s freely floating exchange rate advice (see my recent blog). Instead, they peg their currency to the U.S. dollar. Sometimes they have logical reasons for doing so. Usually, this is because their financial markets and banking systems are not yet developed enough to allow the hedging needed by enterprises… Read more
The FED’s response to the last year’s financial collapse has drawn criticism from all fronts. We’ve contributed to the criticism in small ways. In particular, we don’t like the idea of too-big-to-fail and were unhappy when companies were saved from the axe of failure in the marketplace. Bernanke, though, has brought real and valuable innovations… Read more
