Category Archives: euro

Economists Polled on the Pre-Election Economy

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         A survey of economists is published in the November 2012 issue of Foreign Policy.  One question was whether we thought that the US unemployment rate would dip below 8.0% before the election.   When the FP conducted the poll at the end of the summer, unemployment was 8.1-8.2%.  Now it’s 7.8%.  Only 8% of the respondents said “yes.”   (I was one.  I basically just extrapolated the trend of the last two years.)   

My fellow economists choose defense spending and agricultural subsidies as the two categories of US federal budget that they think the best to cut.  They rate the euro crisis as the greatest threat to the world economy now and are particularly worried about Spain.    read more

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More Black Swans?

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     I have argued that the best way to think of “black swan” events is as developments that, even though low-probability, can in fact be contemplated ahead of time.  Even if they are the sort of thing that has never happened before within an analyst’s memory, similar things may have happened before in the distant past or in other countries.   

     What current possible shocks have probabilities that, even if fairly low, are high enough to warrant thinking about now?  Some have been discussed ad infinitum, others hardly at all. read more

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Black Swans of August

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       Throughout history, big economic and political shocks have often occurred in August, when leaders had gone on vacation in the belief that world affairs were quiet.   Examples of geopolitical jolts that came in August include the outbreak of World War I, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Berlin Wall in 1961.  Subsequent examples of economic and other surprises in August have included the Nixon shock of 1971 (when the American president enacted wage-price controls, took the dollar off gold, and imposed trade controls), 1982 eruption in Mexico of the international debt crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the 1991 Soviet coup, 1992 crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007.   Many of these shocks constituted events that had previously not even appeared on most radar screens. They were considered unthinkable.  read more

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