Economics In Denial

In an exasperated outburst, just before he left the presidency of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet complained that, “as a policymaker during the crisis, I found the available [economic and financial] models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools.” Read […]

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Indonesia: The Downside of Decentralization

Over the past decade and a half, Indonesia’s democratic transition has been praised (including by me)  as one of the most impressive of any developing country in the world. The distance traveled from the chaos, and potential split-up of the country, in the late 1990s, to the relative stability and high growth of today, is […]

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Everything You Think You Know About China Is Wrong

For the last 40 years, Americans have lagged in recognizing the declining fortunes of their foreign rivals. In the 1970s they thought the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall — ascendant even though corruption and inefficiency were destroying the vital organs of a decaying communist regime. In the late 1980s, they feared that Japan was […]

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