Twenty years ago next month, the British government gave the Bank of England the freedom to set interest rates. That decision was part of a trend that made central bankers the most powerful financial actors on the planet, not only setting rates but also buying trillions of dollars’ worth of assets, targeting exchange rates and […]
Ultimately, however, it won’t be Yellen’s P.R. skills that determine how she is remembered. It will be her economic judgment, and her confidence in the enduring strength and vigor of a revived U.S. economy. Read Here – The New Yorker
The Federal Reserve deserves praise for managing once again to carry out a tricky transition without causing disruptions in financial markets and creating too much risk for the real economy. Sustaining this success will require more than just the central bank’s continued responsive policy making, Mohamed El-Erian writes for Bloomberg. Read Here – Bloomberg
At HSBC’s global investment seminar in New York last week, some of the top strategists from Europe’s largest bank laid out their outlook for global markets and economies. Many strategists are not expecting the current recovery from the financial crisis to be as impressive as what has come before, while some investors aren’t expecting double-digit […]
Commodities trading guru and hedge fund manager Jim Rogers has sold his holdings in Indian companies and exited India because, he says, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has failed to live up to investors’ expectations. Read Here – Mint
During the last U.S. presidential election, an editorial in a Chinese state-run newspaper declared that if Washington insisted on flouting Chinese interests (by selling arms to Taiwan, for example), Beijing should “use its financial weapon to teach the U.S. a lesson.” Three years later, America owes even more to China than the $1.16 trillion it owed then. […]
Since the dawn of capitalism, closed societies with repressive governments have — much like China — been capable of remarkable growth and innovation. Sixteenth-century Spain was a great imperial power, with a massive navy and extensive industry such as shipbuilding and mining. One could say the same thing about Louis XIV’s France during the 17th […]
Almost immediately after the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics released its second quarter GDP growth estimate of 7 percent in mid-July, a group of China watchers were crying foul. China officially targeted full-year growth of around 7 percent in 2015, a number matched exactly by its reported GDP figures for the first half of the […]
World stock markets plunged on Monday, after a near 9 percent dive in China shares and a sharp drop in the dollar and major commodities sent investors rushing for the exits. After dropping more than 1,000 points, or almost 7 percent, at Wall Street’s open, the Dow Jones industrial average eased losses but was still off […]
Past Chinese presidents have left the finer points of the economy to their premiers. Not Xi Jinping. Since taking over the ruling Communist Party in November 2012, Xi has given himself direct control over both short-term financial policies and broader economic planning. He exercises this power through two secretive “leading groups,” one a reform panel […]
looking beyond borders 