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For a National Investment Bank
Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin
New York Review of Books
| Wednesday, March 30, 2011
President Obama is in a bind. He knows that the economic recovery is fragile and dependent on continued fiscal stimulus—hence the bipartisan deal on further tax breaks he brokered in December. But he also knows that the tolerance in Washington for deficits of close to 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product is running out. In the short term, the politics of the new Congress will not allow them; and in the long term, the President’s own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has warned against them.
The President’s dilemma was on open display in his State of the Union address in January. It is, he said, deficit spending by government that has “broken the back of this recession”; and government-supported investment in
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Book Review: The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Fixing Global Finance
1.
By common consent, we have been living through the greatest economic downturn since World War II. It originated, as we all know, in a collapse of the banking system, and the first attempts to understand the resulting economic crisis focused on the reasons for bank failures. The banks, it was said, had failed to "manage" the new "risks" posed by financial innovation. Alan Greenspan's statement that the cause of the crisis was the "underpricing of risk worldwide" was the most succinct expression of this view.[1] Particular attention was paid to the role of the American subprime mortgage market as the source of the so-called "toxic" assets that had
by Martin Wolf
Johns Hopkins University Press, 230 pp., $24.95
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Book Review: Can You Spare a Dime?
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Friday, December 26, 2008
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 442 pp., $29.95
The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary[1] as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel Prize–winning mathematical economists who devised the Black-Scholes formula—the complicated model for
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Gloomy About Globalization
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, April 17, 2008
Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Norton, 358 pp., $26.95; $15.95 (paper)
1.
Making Globalization Work is the third of Joseph Stiglitz's popular, and populist, books.[1] Like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz is an economist turned preacher, one of a new breed of secular evangelists produced by the fall of communism. Stiglitz wants to stop rich countries from exploiting poor countries without damaging the springs of wealth-creation. In that sense he is a classic social democrat. His missionary fervor, though, is very American. "Saving the Planet," one of this new book's chapter headings, could have been its title.
Stiglitz is in favor of globalization—which he defines as "the closer economic integration of the countries of the
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Winning a Gamble with Communism
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Thursday, May 31, 2007
By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey
by János Kornai
MIT Press, 461 pp., $40.00
The Hungarian János Kornai is the most famous, and certainly the most influential, economist to have emerged from postwar Communist Europe.[1] His reputation is based on three books, Overcentralization, Economics of Shortage, and The Socialist System, which knocked away the intellectual foundations of the publicly owned, bureaucratically planned economy. In one sense, he was in the line of critics of central planning such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who had argued in the 1930s that it could not be efficient. But Kornai was the first of these critics who wrote from the concrete experience of a centrally planned
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