The Significance of Gold’s Record $2,000 Price

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August 24, 2020 — The price of gold reached an all-time record high of $2,000 per ounce this month.  Mainstream economic thinking has treated gold as a side-show since the world went off the gold standard. Nevertheless, the recent spiking in the price signals some important trends. It is not merely “sound and fury signifying nothing,” as sometimes seems true of financial markets.

There are three ready explanations for the historic increase in the price of gold: (i) monetary policy, (ii) risk, and (iii) a spreading desire for an alternative to the dollar as a safe haven.  Each of these explanations contains some truth. read more

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The Impact of the Pandemic on Developing Countries

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August 3, 2020 — The Covid-19 pandemic has had differentiated impacts across countries. This is true even among the set of Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs), which share the disadvantages of more poverty, less adequate health care, and fewer jobs that can be done remotely, compared to Advanced Economies.

Differentiation across continents

Surprisingly, the rates of infection and death have so far been lower in most EMDEs than in the US and Europe, as pointed out by Pinelopi Goldberg and Tristan Reed, and by Raghuram  Rajan. Undercounting is undoubtedly massive, however. Furthermore, the situation is evolving rapidly. read more

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Defining recessions when negative growth is too common or too rare

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June 20, 2020 — This post follows up on “What Determines When a Recession is Recession?” which pointed out some drawbacks of defining a recession by two negative quarters of growth.

In some countries there is another, more fundamental, basis for questioning the two-quarter rule for determining recession, or any GDP-based rule. Some countries experience sharp slowdowns or periods of diminished economic activity and yet their long-term trend growth rates are either so high or so low that the negative-growth rule does not capture what is needed to describe the cyclical state of the economy. For such countries, the problem is that perhaps there is nothing special about the number zero.  This is particularly true for the global economy considered as a whole. read more

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