Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein both say, following Joe Gagnon, that the time for criticizing China for "currency manipulation" has passed. This is partly true in the sense that China's currency has risen substantially in real terms against the dollar over the last few years. However this does not mean either that the relative value of the dollar and the yuan is now at a sustainable level or that China is not continuing as a matter of policy to prop up the dollar against its currency.Thoma and DeLong seem to agree with Krugman and Klein. Is this a reaction to Romney's China bashing during the debates as the Presidential race tightens?
minutes later, however, it became clear that while the court had rejected an expansive view of the Constitution’s commerce clause (which the administration had argued gave Congress the power to make people buy health insurance), it had in fact upheld the health care law on grounds that the individual mandate fell under Congress’s broad power to levy taxes.
Usually, I experience an erosion of confidence around famous people—an inescapable conviction that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more available to them. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis. Seemingly untouched by Hollywood, they did not project the jadedness that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of the best-read people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both devout Bulls fans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of narration and a passionate love for Chicago.
Eventually, I asked them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.” They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the script to every major studio, after Warner Bros. had declined to exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemed too challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The Matrix” had also been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them nearly three years to get the green light on it. But the best the studio could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility of buying the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a portion of the projected budget.
...
“The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,” Lana told me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The Matrix,” the Wachowskis recalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.
In the parking lot outside Hanks’s office, the Wachowskis and Tykwer shook off the bad news before going in. Hanks had read the screenplay, though not the book. “The script was not user-friendly,” he told me. “The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the business risk, were off the scale.” But he was interested in working with the directors and intrigued by the challenge of playing six different roles in one film. Hanks was in the middle of reading “Moby-Dick” and, when the filmmakers sat down, he engaged them in a discussion of Melville’s masterpiece. Lana pointed at a poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was serendipitously hanging on the wall of Hanks’s office, and said, “ ‘Moby-Dick’ and this—that’s what we want to do.” “I’m in,” Hanks said. “When do we start?” Looking back at that meeting, Hanks told me that he had been particularly impressed that the Wachowskis “were not ashamed to say, ‘We make art!’ ”
With Hanks on board, the directors went back to Warner Bros. to plead their case. They insisted that a project as narratively complex as “Cloud Atlas” had no precedent and therefore no template. They presented the overarching story as a tale of redemption, of the continuity of essential human goodness, whereby individual acts of kindness have unforeseeable repercussions. They broke the story down into a simple progression: “Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person,” they said, “but evolves over centuries into a good person.” Warner Bros. was convinced, and the studio was in for distribution, but with a lower offer than the directors had hoped for.
Most Americans have not formed an opinion about him. He has a long record of radical votes and is the functional leader of a wildly unpopular Congressional wing. The one real electoral test of his plan’s political tolerability came in a special election in a Republican district in upstate New York in 2011, in which an underdog Democrat swept to victory by relentlessly pounding Ryan’s plan, and especially its provision to privatize Medicare.
Good news! Gas prices could go down to $2 a gallon by autumn -- and that's bad news for Vladimir Putin.
...
In an email exchange, Verleger pointed me to an interview he did a few days ago with Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times. First, he explains, the Saudis are out for blood when it comes to fellow petro-states Russia and Iran, the former for failing to help calm the fury in Syria, and the latter for refusing to go to heel and give up its nuclear ambitions; in both cases, the Saudis think lower prices will produce a more reasonable attitude. In addition, Saudi Arabia is terrified of a current U.S. boom in shale oil; it is hoping that lower prices will render much of the drilling in North Dakota's Bakken Shale and Canada's oil sands uneconomical. Finally, the Saudis are well aware that low oil prices helped to turn around the global economic downturn in 1998 and 1999, and they hope to help accomplish the same now, and perhaps win new affection from the world's leading economies.
“It is absolutely an important assumption that if the economy really tanks, really tanks, as the result of strong headwinds coming from Europe, it would be a more challenging environment,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
While political analysts say Mr. Obama, as the incumbent, would bear the brunt of the political fallout of another economic crisis, some Republicans are fretting as well. At a Washington dinner party two weeks ago, David Smick, a Republican financial consultant, approached Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, with a provocative question. “What if I told you that given what’s happening in Europe, that whoever is president in 2013 might not see his party elected for another 30 years,” Mr. Smick told Mr. Rove, according to guests who were present. Mr. Rove, one guest said, “just listened.”
In an interview, Mr. Smick said that the European crisis, in his view, could eventually make another huge government bailout like the controversial bank rescue program of late 2008 and 2009 necessary. But most political analysts say that could be political suicide for the country’s leaders. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Obama was on the phone with Mrs. Merkel again. “As usual,” the White House said in a statement afterward, “the president expressed his appreciation for the efforts the chancellor and other European leaders are making to resolve the crisis.”
His model forecasts real annualized growth in gross domestic product of 3.69 percent for the first three quarters of 2012. A survey of leading economists by Blue Chip Economic Indicators shows an average forecast of 3.2 percent growth in real G.D.P. in 2012, while the Congressional Budget Office estimates 3.4 percent. Plug either of these estimates into his election algorithm and the result is the same: President Obama wins.He believes the Fed will keep policy stimulative.
Others have illuminated facets of the crisis in more depth. John Cassidy’s "How Markets Fail" explained the economic history and theory with greater sophistication. Gillian Tett’s "Fool’s Gold" offered a journey into one investment bank, J. P. Morgan, and a close look at how it helped create a financial instrument, the credit derivative, that amplified risk rather than minimizing it. "In Fed We Trust," by David Wessel, took the reader behind the scenes in Washington, where politicians and regulators missed all the warning signs. For their part, McLean and Nocera concentrate on the basics and bring them together in brisk, well-organized chapters.I've read Cassidy's book and Wessel's book, but need to get Tett's.
Another public quarrel McLean and Nocera bring into focus is the esoteric debate about Federal Reserve monetary policy. Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has pushed interest rates practically to zero to try to stimulate growth and reduce an unemployment rate that currently hovers near 10 percent. Dissenters from this policy, like Thomas M. Hoenig, the president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, warn that Bernanke is repeating the mistake of his predecessor, Greenspan, who employed similar measures to combat the recession that followed the dot-com crash of 2000.There are two different issues about Greenspan. His approach to regulation and his approach to interest rates. Hoenig and Barrett erroneously conflate the two.
