Should the Fed Stop Tightening?
The Federal Open Market Committee raised its federal funds rate target by 25 basis points on Wednesday. It has raised its target by 450 basis points over the last year. In December, the median FOMC member projected the target would exceed 5 percent in 2023, but some think the Fed has already done enough to […]
Super-tight policy is still struggling to control inflation
In october we examined the fortunes of Hikelandia. In this group of eight countries—Brazil, Chile, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland and South Korea—central banks have thrown the kitchen sink at inflation. They started raising interest rates well before America’s Federal Reserve and on average have done so more forcefully, too. Yet we found little […]
The AI boom: lessons from history
It can take a little imagination to see how some innovations might change an economy. Not so with the latest ai tools. It is easy—from a writer’s perspective, uncomfortably so—to think of contexts in which something like Chatgpt, a clever chatbot which has taken the web by storm since its release in November, could either […]
China is paralysing global debt-forgiveness efforts
Given that his country is on the brink, Mohammad Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s economy minister, is strangely serene. In the week to January 20th, his government burned through a quarter of its dollar reserves, leaving $3.5bn to cover loan repayments and imports that will probably come to more than twice that in the first quarter of […]
The last gasp of the meme-stock era
Two years ago the stockmarket was in the grip of speculative mania. Shares in GameStop, a struggling video-game retailer, hit an all-time intraday high of $483 on January 28th 2021, up from around $5 at the beginning of the month. Retail traders co-ordinated in a Reddit forum and snapped up shares using brokerage apps like […]
FirstFT: Fed slows rate rises while ECB to stick to half-point increase
Good morning. This article is an on-site version of our FirstFT newsletter. Sign up to our Asia, Europe/Africa or Americas edition to get it sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning The US Federal Reserve increased its benchmark interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point yesterday, marking a return to a slower, […]
Biden to End Orders Declaring Covid a National Emergency on May 11, Because Why Not?
By Lambert Strether of Corrente. So Biden is declaring that Covid is no longer a national emergency (and never mind that Covid is now a leading cause of death among children and adolescents. That’s just a statistic, as Stalin is wrongly said to have remarked). Why not? Biden declared that “the pandemic is over” on […]
