Word: economisters
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...Lancelot of economics, Alan Greenspan, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II last week. But some top economists worry that the U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman has moved too slowly to slay the dragon they hear stirring: deflation. The term describes an economic slough of despond in which capacity exceeds demand, inflation drops below 0%, companies sit on their cash rather than investing it, prices fall and wages retreat. Workers paid low wages in inflationary times find their debt harder to repay if they get a further cut-a terrible prospect in this period of record credit-card bills. Deflation has devastated...
What's behind the leap? There's the slumping economy, of course. When unemployment rises, late payments aren't far behind. But Mortgage Bankers Association economist Doug Duncan cites two other factors: the wider availability of credit to people who have in the past had trouble paying their bills, and a proliferation of such innovative mortgage products as interest-only loans, which--because they drive monthly payments artificially low--have encouraged people to buy bigger homes than they can afford...
World-renowned economist Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76, who left Harvard this summer for a post at Columbia University, returned to Cambridge yesterday to charge America with failing to meet its commitments to help fight global health crises...
...cherished by generations to come.” His speech was remarkably prescient, given the events of the past two decades. After the Gulf War ended in 1991, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney specifically thanked Israel for the 1981 action that had made victory possible. Indeed, the Economist magazine recently noted that if Saddam “had already had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait 11 years ago, he might still be there...
David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says there is little hard evidence that IM makes offices more efficient. "My strong suspicion is that there are no further productivity gains to immediate communication that haven't already been realized by e-mail," he says. At the same time, he adds, IM provides an even greater temptation than e-mail does to "set aside real work" and engage in office gossip or chitchat with friends. Instant messaging, he says, offers "a vast potential for time waste...