Why newborns cry ?

Source: www.econosseur.com

The Predators

The American Booksellers Association (A.B.A), which represents independently owned bookstores, has sent a letter to the Justice Department asking it to investigate the “predatory’’ behavior of Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that “is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers’’ with the steep discounting on 10 hardcover titles. The association’s letter accused the retailers of “devaluing the very concept of the book” and effectively selling the books at a loss in an “attempt to win control of the market for hardcover best sellers.”

Click here and here to read the articles.

Source: Greg Mankiw’s Blog

Love - Hate relationship

Click to read and listen from Economist a special report on U.S and China.

"GDP fetishism"

The gross domestic product (GDP) is a basic measure of a country's economic performance and is the market value of all final goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year. But is also GDP a measure of wel-being?

Click here to read the article from Economist.

Some inportant notes:

America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off?

How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job.

In recent years economists have therefore been looking at other measures of well-being—even “happiness”, a notion that it once seemed absurd to quantify.

It takes no account of the depreciation of capital goods, and so overstates the value of production.

In 2005, the commission found, France’s real GDP per person was 73% of America’s. But once government services, household production and leisure are added in, the gap narrows: French households had 87% of the adjusted income of their American counterparts.

Book Proposal

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis

By Johan Norberg

Miron on Financial Market Reforms

Click here to read an article to reason.com from Jeffrey A. Miron (Department of Economics, Harvard University) for why new regulation must avoid moral hazard.

Debate

Click here if you want to join the Economist Debate Series.

This series subject: Executives Pay

Conference Notes

I found in Econbrowser two very interesting presentations at the conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston last week with the title: After the Fall: Re-Evaluating Supervisory, Regulatory, and Monetary Policy.

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke spoke on Financial Regulation and Supervision after the Crisis while Princeton Professor Alan Blinder's presentation title was: It's Broke, Let's Fix It: Rethinking Financial Regulation.

Source: www.about.com

Anniversary

On October 29th, 1929, Wall Street saw the worst day in its history.

New Deal 2.0 asked America’s leading progressive thinkers to talk about what the past can teach us and what our focus for the future should be.

Perspectives will include: Elizabeth Warren, Rob Johnson, Bill Black, Bo Cutter, Marshall Auerback, Bruce Judson, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, Mario Seccarreccia, David Woolner, , Barbara Arnwine, Jeff Madrick, Heather Gerken, Tom Ferguson, Eliot Spitzer, and Henry C.K. Liu.

Click here to join the discussion

YouTube Video Contest

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ Economic Education group seeking online videos that illustrate one or more of the below economic concepts for a high school audience:

(a) scarcity, (b) factors of production, (c) opportunity cost

The contest begins Oct. 23, 2009, and runs through Dec. 18, 2009.

To compete, entrants must be 18 years or older and enrolled part or full-time at a U.S. college or university and submissions can be from an individual or from a team.

GOOD YEARs (Part Three)

Further my previous posts for protectionism, China took steps to impose antidumping duties on nylon imports from the U.S., European Union, Russia and Taiwan that have hurt the local industry. As you can understand this move is the next step to a series of trade disputes after the Obama's move in September to impose duties on imports of tires from China. For more information click here to read the article from Wall Street Journal.

Roubini and the next big crash coming...

Prof. N. Roubini (Stern School of Business at NYU), is well konwn for his predictions of the financial market collapse in 2005. Click here to read his interview in IndexUniverse.com with his thoughts and predictions for the next crash...

China Co.

Click here to read an article from Bloomberg with China's economic condition and investment prospects.

Risk averse...

Economic Professors follow safe strategies in there investment and save more time for there academic activities. Click here to read an article from The Harvard Crimson with three Professors from Harvard university analyzing there investment strategies.

Rogoff on China's Dollar Problem

Kenneth Rogoff is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the IMF. Click here to read his article in Project Syndicate.

The Dead Street

Click here to read an article from Andrew Ross Sorkin (Vanity Fair) for the days back in September 2008 that shocked world markets.

Source: www.economist.com

Wolf on Dollar

Is the U.S Dollar dead? Which currency can replace it? Click here for the answear from Martin Wolf (Financial Times).

1/2 Nobel Prize goes to...

Elinor Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, Indiana University. She mainly focus on how do we integrate the research findings in cognitive science into a workable set of models for exploring and explaining human choices in various institutional settings, including: social dilemmas, collective choice arenas, bureaucracies, and complex multitiered public economies, how do institutions generate the information that individuals need to make decisions, what biases or lack of biases are built into various ways of making collective decisions and how are diverse preferences exaggerated or modified by interaction within diverse institutional structures.

Below you can find some representative publications

Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor (1992). Crafting Institutions for Self-Gover ning Irrigation Systems.
San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

Ostrom, E., Schroeder, L. & Wynne, S. (1993). Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development:Infrastructure Policies in Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Ostrom, E., Walker, J. & Gardner, R. (1994). Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

1/2 Nobel Prize goes to...

Oliver E. Williamson is a Professor Emeritus of Business, Economics, and Law, Hass Business and Public Policy group, University of California, Berkeley. He focus mainly in Economic theories of firms, markets, hybrids, and public agencies.

See below some recent awards:

Doctoris Honoris Causa in Economics, Nice University, 2005

Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics, 2004

Doctoris Honoris Causa in Economics, Valencia University, 2004

Honorary Editor, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2002

Eminent Scholar of the Fellows of the Academy of International Business, 2002

Doctoris Honoris Causa in Economics, University of Chile, 2000

Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration, Copenhagen Business School, 2000

John von Neumann Prize, 1999

And some recent selected papers and publications:

"The Economics of Governance." American Economic Review (2005).

"The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure." Journal of Economic Perspectives (2002).

The Mechanisms of Governance. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1996. (Translated into Italian by Margherita Turvani, and reprinted by Franco Angeli.)

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting. New York: The Free Press, 1985. (Translated into Spanish by Eduardo L. Suarez, reprinted by Cultura Economica, 1989; translated into Italian by Margherita Turvani, 1987; translated into German and reprinted by J.C.B. Mohr, 1990; translated into Russian by Valery Katkalo et al., published by Lenizdat, 1995; translated into French by Regis Coeurderoy and Emmanuelle Mainant, published by InterEditions, 1994; translated into Polish and published by Polish Scientific Publishers, 1998.)

Click here for his personal web page.

...and the winner is...

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences goes to Elinor Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" and Oliver E. Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm."

For gamblers...

From Greg Mankiew's blog find below the odds offered at Ladbrokes, the UK-based gambling company, for some candidates for this year's Nobel prize in economics:

Eugene Fama 2/1
Paul Romer 4/1
Ernst Fehr 6/1
Kenneth R. French 6/1
William Nordhaus 6/1
Robert Barro 7/1
Matthew J Rabin 8/1
Jean Tirole 9/1
Martin Weitzman 9/1
Chris Pissarides 10/1
Dale T Mortensen 10/1
Xavier Sala-i-Martin 10/1
Avinash Dixit 14/1
Jagdish N. Bhagwati 14/1
Robert Schiller [sic] 14/1
William Baumol 16/1
Martin S. Feldstein 20/1
Christopher Sims 25/1
Lars P. Hansen 25/1
Nancy Stokey 25/1
Peter A Diamond 25/1
Thomas J. Sargent 25/1
Dale Jorgenson 33/1
Paul Milgrom 33/1
Oliver Hart 40/1
Bengt R Holmstrom 50/1
Elhanan Helpman 50/1
Ellinor Ostrom 50/1
Gene M Grossman 50/1
Karl-Goran Maler 50/1
Oliver Williamson 50/1
Robert B Wilson 50/1

IMF in Turkey

Click here to read an article from Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, regarding the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Istanbul.

Read below few notes:

The world could still make two mistakes: first, we might withdraw stimulus too soon; second, we might lose the opportunity for reform. We must avoid both dangers. That is the lesson I learnt at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Istanbul. So where are we and where do we need to go? Think of this in terms of five ‘r’s: rescue; recovery; rebalancing; regulation; and reform.

In response, the authorities socialized most financial liabilities, launched unprecedented monetary easing and ran fiscal deficits never before seen in peacetime. In the high-income countries, support for the financial sector – via capital injections, guarantees, asset purchases and liquidity provision – was 29 per cent of 2008 gross domestic product The IMF forecasts the fiscal deficit of these countries at 9 per cent of GDP in 2009. The rise envisaged in public debt compares to that of a big war.

We must not forget what such a recovery would mean: few economies are likely to see a fall in unemployment or in excess capacity over the next year. Moreover, the recovery is hugely dependent on the surge in government spending and the inventory cycle, particularly in the US. As the IMF stresses, “the main risk is that private demand in advanced economies remains very weak”.

They are two longer-term issues: regulation of the financial sector and reform of the international monetary system. Both are now on the agenda. But on both action is likely to fall far short of what is needed.

This is not a time for a return to business as usual. We have survived this crisis. But we could not cope with another, possibly bigger and yet more dangerous one in a few years. Let us now show posterity we are able to learn from history.