Word: economists
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...Confidence Game As director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag is a card-carrying numbers guy. But lately Orszag has been reading up on that aspect of the economy ungoverned by numbers: the realm of groundswell and mojo - our "animal spirits," in the vivid words of economist John Maynard Keynes. Spirits such as trust, belief and confidence. When surging, these spirits can turn a slump into a boom and a boom into a bubble, but once they shatter, it's a devilish job trying to resurrect them. That's because other animal spirits rise up to take...
...gradual rollout of version 2.0 of his bank plan - not necessarily bigger than the $787 billion package that left the markets cold, but sharper and more plausible. The trouble with the initial draft unveiled unartfully last month by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, says Moody's Economy.com chief economist Mark Zandi, was that it was "too clever by half," creating elaborate incentives for private investors when the simple solution would be to have Uncle Sam immediately wade in, grab control, wring out the bad debt and punish the malefactors. The more complex approach attempted to avoid the stigma and huge...
Sounds awfully logical. So why haven't we stuck it to these guys? Because we're afraid they'll panic. "Unfortunately, we've built a system where if you hammer those guys hard, you're going to have a global credit collapse," said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and whose blog, Baseline Scenario, has become essential reading for crisis buffs. The Federal Reserve and Treasury left creditors at Lehman Brothers adrift in September, and the repercussions were so dire that regulators resolved not to let such...
Manufacturers can't count on a swift rebound once a recovery is in progress. Americans are starting to save more, and they may not return to their free-spending ways for years. "There is good reason to believe the capitulation of the American consumer has only just begun," said economist Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Ajay Chhibber, director of the Asia bureau at the United Nations Development Program in New York City, says the tigers can't expect to weather this recession by temporarily increasing government spending to boost growth until Western export markets recover. "The model where...
...tigers really want to thrive, the answer might lie in rejecting a legacy of Park Chung Hee: the idea that government alone can successfully engineer high economic performance. Jim Walker, an economist at the research firm Asianomics in Hong Kong, argues that Asia's politicians still intervene too much in their economies instead of allowing market forces to work. "What governments need to do is start trusting their own people rather than hoping the West is going to get it right all of the time," Walker says. For the tigers to keep roaring, they may need to find their future...