The New Republic

Martin Wolf invokes an interesting counter-factual: Suppose that the US presidential election of 1932 had, in fact, taken place in 1930, at an early stage in the Great Depression. Suppose, too, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had won then, though not by the landslide of 1932. How different subsequent events might have been. The president might have watched helplessly as output and employment collapsed. The decades of Democratic dominance might not have happened. READ MORE >>

--New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt on how the stimulus averted a depression --My new TRB column on Harold Ford, Jr. --Martin Wolf refutes Niall Ferguson READ MORE >>

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Martin Wolf: Tax windfall bank bonuses. Did the home buyer tax credit weaken the rental market? READ MORE >>

Matt Yglesias flagged a sober point (among many) in Martin Wolf's latest column:  READ MORE >>

Long before Martin Wolf became the chief economics columnist for the Financial Times, he wrote the newspaper letters--lots and lots of letters. It was the early 1980s, the height of the Thatcher era, and Wolf was running research at a think tank in London that was sympathetic to the government's pro-trade agenda. The FT's letters section became the ideal place to take to task all those who would stand in the way of the first waves of globalization. READ MORE >>

Almost four months after his inauguration, President Barack Obama is still riding high in the polls. According to Gallup, 66 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing. But I expect that Obama’s popularity will begin to fall, even plummet, as the leaves turn brown. That’s not to say he is doing a bad job, but that the tasks he faces in fixing the economy remain daunting, and beyond resolution in his first year or, perhaps, even first term. READ MORE >>

Amid all the jostling in London, Martin Wolf ordered the great powers to quit arguing over trifles and focus on the real imbalances in the global economy: the massive current account surpluses that China ($372 bn), Germany ($253 bn), and Japan ($211 bn) have accumulated in recent years (2007 figures), which supported cheap credit and over-borrowing on the part of the U.S. government and private lenders. READ MORE >>

I'm not the first person on this blog to recommend the FT's Martin Wolf as a must-read financial columnist. He's the best, in my opinion, if only because he a) gets apparently as much space as he wants and b) has a uniquely non-US perspective, a critical point of view in a crisis that is only partly about the American economy. Today's column is a pessimistic look at the Geithner plan; I'll save you the details, but there's one point that jumped out: READ MORE >>

We are now on our second multibillion-dollar plan to bail out Wall Street. The Bush administration has abandoned the free-market ideology that laid the groundwork for the crisis, acknowledging that nothing less than wholesale intervention can prevent a complete collapse of the global financial system. Yet the question remains: Have we finally regained control of the economy? Nobody knows for sure, but, with its move to restore trust in the banking system, the United States will certainly ease the credit crunch. READ MORE >>