1) The Financial Times on Europe's woes. There is a real danger that the Eurozone could implode, if different governments continue to face very different borrowing conditions. The article states that the yield spread between German government bonds and Italian ones is very high right now: investors demand a premium for buying up the public debt of Europe's economic laggards. In response, the ECB has announced a new bond buying program directed at countries with high public debt borrowing costs. This amounts to monetization of the debt of Europe's slower-growing countries. Such a goal conflicts with the ECB's other pressing objective - that of tamping down inflation. This is a situation that deserves close monitoring, as the repercussions of a new European debt crisis would be global.
2) Over at the WSJ, Gwynn Guilford provides a useful update on the inflation situation in the US. I agree with the gist of the article - inflation may have settled at a 7-8% level, i.e. prices may have stopped accelerating. Getting inflation down back to the Fed's 2% target is another matter altogether. Also at the WSJ, Senator Elizabeth Warren criticizes the Fed's approach to fighting inflation. It is a useful counterpoint to the conventional wisdom on the subject, but I am afraid I cannot agree with Senator Warren. Demand management is an essential - perhaps the essential - component of an inflation-fighting strategy. And her proposed enhancement of antitrust policy stringency, while perhaps desirable for other reasons, would do almost nothing to tamp down inflation at the horizon that is required: antitrust enforcement entails court proceedings that take years to come to fruition - assuming they ever do. It is true that a recession would more severely impact the most vulnerable in society - recessions always do. But continued high inflation would also hurt the more vulnerable disproportionately. Raising interest rates will slow down growth and perhaps generate a recession. Instead, a rapid end to our inflationary outburst would create the conditions for a resumption of growth on a healthier, broader basis - as it did in the early 1980s. Finally let me point (via Bloomberg) to the latest pronouncements by Larry Summers on Fed policy. These strike me as right on the mark.
3) Adrian Wooldridge on Henry Kissinger's new book and the current crisis of leadership. There is much to like in this article, and also much to take issue with. For instance I am not sure it is correct to imply that President Nixon "[rose] to the challenge of [his] times" - at least not all the time! But there does seem to be a crisis of leadership around the world - and it is not at all clear how to solve it. Food for thought. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution)
4) Stephen Roach on globalization and how China fits into it. In an ideal world, the policy of engagement with China that was a staple of the 1990s would have continued unabated, and we would have had a chance to see if the forces of rising incomes and greater international integration ended up facilitating political and social modernization in this great country. Instead, events both in China and in the rest of the world conspired to interrupt and reverse the policy of engagement. The world is worse-off for it.