Publications

Among the many endangered species, there is one in particular: natural disasters not caused by climate change. The massive landslide triggered by the collapse of the Birch Glacier, which almost…

Introduction The overwhelming view of financial sector and media is that banks have made strong recoveries from the problems of 2007-9.  Earnings are resilient, share prices strongly up in 2024,…

Blaming China for America’s economic woes has become a bipartisan habit, and shipbuilding is the latest target. In 2024, U.S. labor unions filed a Section 301 petition accusing China of…

Introduction In previous newsletters we looked at the Brexit Re-set, US tariffs, and unconvincing responses to high government debt. Now we examine the response to all of this in the…

In May, we examined how the quality of Chinese exports—as measured by the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) developed by Harvard’s Growth Lab—has significantly improved over the past three decades and…

For the first time in over a decade, momentum is building in the United States to raise the federal minimum wage. On April 8, 2025, lawmakers in Congress introduced the…

The United States has accused China of leveraging an unfair advantage in trade relations and is threatening the imposition of substantial new tariffs. This raises two fundamental questions: are the…

Introduction The scale and servicing cost of government debt are both rising. This will increase the amount of money that governments will have to suck out of economies over the…

WP 2025-05. Executive Summary The temptation to rely on findings from behavioral economics to condition human behavior has given rise to libertarian paternalism, an approach to public policy design that…

Introduction The recent major fall in global stock markets was too large to be solely attributable to Trump’s tariffs. It is an adjustment and possibly the introduction to a period…