Popular myth and, allegedly, the laws of aerodynamics have it that the bumblebee should not be able to take flight. Yet still, our good bumblebee refuses to be pulled down by such details and year after year it takes flight as if nothing has happened. This allegory applies, with some imagination, to Japans economy too. [...]

A few years ago, when Percy Mistry’s committee was working on the MIFC report, I used to joke that of the two great industries in Bombay, movies will make it first to international customers. A few days ago in the New York Times, Anupama Chopra [...]

Ann Elk: Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it. My theory that belongs to me is as follows. This is how it goes. The next thing I’m going to say is my theory. Ready?
TV Interviewer: Yes.
Ann Elk: … This theory goes as follows and begins now. All brontosauruses are thin at one end; [...]

Last week was a good lesson in terms of what might, or what might not, happen when policy makers attempt to steer currency markets. Notwithstanding the obvious question of much how clout policy makers de-facto holds with respect to moving currency markets (not a lot I think), the outgoing finance minister in Japan Hirohisa Fujii [...]

Many people believe that the exchange rate regime (i.e. the monetary policy regime) of each country is its own sovereign choice.
In the Great Depression, we saw the harmful effects of the exchange rate mercantalism that is feasible with fiat money. This was a key motivation for Keynes and others in their design of the post-war [...]

A lower value of the dollar has continued to improve the competitiveness of U.S. exports. That undoubtedly accentuated the decline in October’s trade deficit to $32.9B. The declined followed a September deficit of $35.7, which was revised even lower than initial estimates given last month.
In more good news, exports jumped. It was their sixth month [...]

“In my view … it is impossible to understand this crisis without reference to the global imbalances in trade and capital flows that began in the latter half of the 1990s.” Bernanke (2009)
Executive Summary

Compared with the average quarterly value of GDP in 2007-08, the first two quarters of 2009 are down in nominal terms to [...]

Last week, we learned that industrial production rose yet again in Japan clocking in at 1.4% month-on-month in September after having increased by 1.6% in August.
Companies said they planned to increase production in October and November as well, indicating the recovery from a record export collapse in the first quarter is holding up. Growth in [...]

After a nice and entertaining week in Barcelona where I had the privilege not only to hold a seminar at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, but also to meet a host of interesting people, I thought that it would be about time that I finished my piece on the latest data from Japan which admittedly [...]

I know that I tend to harp quite a bit about the topic above, but I also trust that my readers by now will be well be used to this. One of the main interesting things about the notion that aging might be related to export dependency is that while it enjoys little, if any, [...]