Tag: Economics
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Is Addressing Bilateral Trade Balances the Right Step to Improving Competitiveness?
I find myself thinking a lot on trade balances issues, its implications for a country’s consumption, export and import sectors. Martin Feldstein puts it nicely in this article here by saying “Politicians and economists view trade imbalances very differently. Economists emphasize that the total US trade deficit with the rest of the…
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To Raise or not to Raise – Central Bank’s Monetary Dilemma
Just wanted to highlight this article here by Reuters on the difficulties of being a central bank. As you all know, interest rates by historical standards are at an all time low all over the world now. This has raised concerns on over-inflated stock markets, excessive credit growth and asset…
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The Potential Implications of Trump’s USD1 trillion Infrastructure Fund on Malaysia – Capital Flows Perspective
How should we think about Trump’s USD1 trillion Infrastructure Fund
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Germany’s Current Account Balance – Another of Trump’s “Blame it on the unfair trade policies”
Trump has been blaming countries like China, Germany for its unfair trade practices when he should look at himself in the mirror
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The US Current Account Deficit – Is it China’s fault?
The current account or trade balance, a touchy subject for the US for a long time. As usual with numerous presidents before Trump, Trump blames current account surplus countries like China, Germany and many developing countries for America’s current account deficit which Jeffrey Sachs described Here. The main points Jeffrey Sachs…
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Development and Corruption in Asia – An Unusual Relationship
Cover Image from “Global Research” I have to admit, this is not an easy issue to research or talk about. I have been reading a book titled “Political Business in East Asia” edited by Edmund Terence Gomez, and it basically turned my understanding on economic development/growth and corruption upside down,…
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China’s Fixed Exchange Rate – How does PBOC Maintain it?
An article emerged recently from Bloomberg which you can find here which talks about the rising outflows of yuan from China. As you may have heard, China is actually trying to “internationalise” its Yuan, meaning to make it comparable to the currency big boys like the USD, EURO and Yen as…
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The Implications and Rationale of a Negative Rate Policy, A Consumption Point of View
I have recently read 2 interesting posts on negative rates by Stiglitz and Bernanke . Basically, they are trying to assess the impact and effectiveness of central banks pushing down rates to negative territories. Stiglitz seems to think that it’s not going to be that impactful considering the fact that real interest rates are…
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Stocks and Oil Prices
I have recently read an excellent post by Ben Bernanke about stocks and oil prices, which can be found here . Basically, Bernanke is trying to explain the positive correlation between stocks and oil prices recently, which normally is not the case. As oil prices hit the $30 a barrel level, stocks…
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Why Bank Negara Malaysia should just let the ringgit do its thing – to float freely (Part 3)
In part 2, I wrote about how BNM ultimately will hit the trilemma wall if it decides to “control” the ringgit. In part 3, I will write about what the exchange rate means to Malaysia and how it does not reflect fully the state of the economy. This is entirely…
Slice of P.I.E 