Word: economists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Charting the possible scenarios for trouble has become a growth industry. The Great Depression of 1990, an offbeat work by the heretofore little-known economist Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, has perched on the New York Times best-seller list for twelve weeks and has sold more than 300,000 copies. Competing doomsday books bear such titles as Blood in the Streets (a how-to manual for crisis investing), The Panic of '89 (a fictional thriller about global financial follies) and The National Debt (an indictment of America's borrowing habits...
...cash-laden investors are bidding wildly. In the 1920s that place was Manhattan; today it is Tokyo. In the overheated Tokyo exchange, shares are trading at about triple the level of Wall Street stocks in terms of the ratio of prices to corporate earnings. Says Eric Shubert, an international economist for Manhattan's Bankers Trust: "Lots of inexperienced people in Tokyo are playing the market; they have switched from comic books to the stock pages, just as in America in the 1920s millions of people switched from baseball scores to stock tables." If Tokyo's market collapses, hard-pressed Japanese...
...distribution of income has tended to wind up unevenly slanted toward the rich. In 1929 1% of U.S. families held 36.3% of the wealth; the proportion fell as low as 20.8% in 1949 but rose back to 34.3% by 1983, Economist Batra notes in The Great Depression of 1990. That disparity is dangerous, he contends, because banks with idle money are tempted to make shaky loans to financially strapped customers, while the rich tend to make increasingly risky investments in search of ever larger returns...
...almost twice the country's gross national product. "The increase of real debt ((adjusted for inflation)) occurred at about the same pace as real GNP growth during the '50s, '60s and '70s. But in the '80s it has occurred at double the rate," notes W. Van Bussman, a corporate economist for Chrysler. The current levels of debt might be supportable if good times went on forever. But during a recession the cascade of defaults would aggravate an economic downturn...
...cliff-hanger of all, the U.S. foreign-trade deficit. That imbalance between exports and imports, which reached a record $170 billion last year, prompts jitters among foreign moneymen, many of whom feel that too much of their trade surpluses are tied up in dollars and U.S. Treasury securities. Says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "The danger is that we have accumulated under the Reagan Administration such enormous overseas obligations that these could, if liquidated, create a very, very nasty run on the dollar and also a nasty collapse of the stock market." Adding to the jitters about the dollar...