Word: economist
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...tariff dispute could lead to an escalating round of conflict between the two nations, souring overall U.S.-China ties. "The action taken by the U.S. government no doubt will damage the Sino-American relationship seriously at a time when mutual trust is most needed," comments Yu Yongding, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "This is indeed a very bad beginning for the Obama government in terms of cooperation" between the two countries. (See pictures of people around the world watching Obama's Inauguration...
...must keep a lid on deficit spending "to demonstrate that they're fiscally responsible," says Gerald Curtis, a Japanese-politics expert and professor at Columbia University. Not everyone is convinced they'll succeed. Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities in Tokyo, is skeptical that cutting wasteful spending will compensate for growing expenditures: Japan's aging population means social-security spending alone must expand by $10.7 billion annually over the next five years. "The DPJ will have to show people a consistent way to finance additional spending," Kanno says. "This has nothing to do with political ideologies...
...Europe is simple. The E.U. has pledged to slash greenhouse gas pollution by a fifth of 1990 levels by 2020. But the bloc's Emission Trading Scheme only covers around 40% of its emissions. The U.S. plan, by comparison, will cover roughly double that portion, says Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London. (Unlike the U.S., Europe, didn't include the petroleum sector in its own scheme, preferring to more heavily tax the industry instead.) Extending the "fiendishly complicated" system, as Tilford calls it, would be enormously difficult. Brussels "is worried that this system...
...economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun's law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it's really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It's a labor version of how the accelerator...
...This is a new idea in a nation where our most iconic economist, Milton Friedman, wrote in 1970 that a corporation's only moral responsibility was to increase shareholder profits. Since 1995, the number of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds, which generally avoid buying shares of companies that profit from such things as tobacco, oil or child labor, has grown from 55 to about 260. SRI funds now manage approximately 11% of all the money invested in U.S. financial markets - an estimated $2.7 trillion...