September 24, 2022 — The dollar is sky-high. Since May 2021, it has risen 19 % against Europe’s euro, even reaching 1-to-1 parity in recent weeks. The dollar has appreciated 20 % against Britain’s pound. And it is up 28 % against Japan’s yen, provoking the Bank of Japan to sell dollars on September 22, essentially the first foreign exchange intervention by a G-7 country since 2011 and the first in the direction of supporting a currency’s value against the dollar since the euro in 2000.
August 28, 2022 — Project Syndicate asked, “Is a Global Recession Inevitable?” Steven Roach says, “yes”; Anne Krueger says, “Depends…Certainly not inevitable”; & Jim O’Neill says, “Quite possible.”
My answer to the question, Is a global recession inevitable:
No. A global recession is entirely “evitable.”
True, the odds of a downturn are high in Europe, hard-hit by the need to manage winter without Russian natural gas; China, where Covid shutdowns already turned growth negative last quarter; and Emerging Market and Developing Economies, many of which have debt troubles.
August 26, 2022 — Among the most salient of economic developments in the last two years have been big movements in the prices of oil, minerals, and agricultural commodities. It was hard to miss the big rise in commodity prices. The Brent oil price increased from a low $20 a barrel in April 2020, during the first Covid-19 wave, to a peak of $122, in March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. But it was not just oil. The price of copper doubled over this period. Wheat more than doubled. And so on. Global indices of commodity prices almost tripled from April 2020 to March 2022.