On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell announced that the central bank would no longer treat inflation as a primary threat to economic growth, stability and employment and would allow for more inflation in the years ahead before acting to tame it.
Read moreThe Economic Model of Higher Education Was Already Broken. Here's Why the Pandemic May Destroy It for Good
With the fall semester upon us, colleges and universities unveiled their plans for students—and many are just as quickly upending those plans.
Read moreIt’s Official: Conventions Are History. So What Replaces Them?
The parties killed the convention before the pandemic. Now they have a chance to reinvent it.
Read moreWe Don't Just Need More Stimulus — We Need Smarter Stimulus
With the Republican-led Senate only just now unveiling its first draft of a next stimulus package and passage of a final bill dependent on weeks of arduous negotiations between Congress and the White House, the already-tenuous economic recovery just became more tenuous.
Read moreThe Anti-American Century
The Anti-American Century may turn out to be aggressively hostile to the United States, but for now it is anti-American mostly in the sense of being antithetical to the American Century.
Read moreThe COVID-19 Recession Should Be So Much Worse. Why Hasn't It Been?
And yet, as bad as things are economically, it remains an open question why things aren’t worse. The answer is simple, and challenging: we may all be in this together as humans facing a virus but we are not equally in this together in bearing the economic toll.
Read moreHow to Avoid the Shutdown 'Kill Switch'
Ninety days into the Covid-19 pandemic and shutdown, American leaders now have to confront an unsettling truth: Bringing an entire economy to a halt so fast, and so widely, isn’t a decision they can just reverse.
Read moreNo, This Isn’t as Bad as 1968 (So Far)
The blue CitiBike I was riding, unlocked with an iPhone, was very much a 21st-century phenomenon, but the landscape around it felt like 1968. In the past days, 1968 has emerged as a meme, a way to understand what we’re living through right now.
Read moreA Safety Net Should Help People Feel Safe. The U.S. Managed to Do the Opposite
The primary reason for this massive surge in unemployment is of course the pandemic and the economic shutdowns to contain it. But government policy is also to blame.
Read moreNo Matter How Dire the Coronavirus Threat, Fear Is Not the Way Out
And he would recognize in the United States today something very similar to early 1933, that in the throes of a viral pandemic, we are mired in a psychological one as well: we are in the grip of fear, and it is paralyzing us.
Read moreIf Trump Says it, Does That Mean it's Not True?
Fear of the disease is rational, but the response of “Stay home until there is no fear” is not. We need to start solving this problem — and opening schools, regardless of who says what.
Read moreTrump Picks the Worst Possible Moment to Attack China
It would be difficult to select a worse moment not just to escalate the rhetoric against China for its culpability in the globalization of COVID-19 but to consider a raft of economic sanctions.
Read moreTo Survive the Pandemic, Washington Needs to Learn How to Listen
But it also reveals a problem in how the United States has handled the crisis so far: A policy vacuum is being filled by one set of experts rather than a more comprehensive approach that balances risks and shifts when necessary.
Read moreStocks Are Recovering While the Economy Collapses. That Makes More Sense Than You'd Think.
What is going on? How can it be that stocks are soaring when the economy is crashing?
Read moreWe Need to Talk About Death
But, in truth, there are things much worse than death. There always have been. Death is as much a part of the human condition as birth, love, sex, hunger, community, war, family. It is a natural part of the cycle of life, however, challenging that is for most of us.
Read moreThe US and China Want a Divorce, but Neither Can Afford One
Three months into the global coronavirus pandemic, there are growing signs that the long marriage between China and the US—indeed between China and the developed world—is coming apart. That’s prompted “a rethink of how much any country wants to be reliant on any other country,”
Read moreCan History’s Biggest Stimulus Stave Off a Coronavirus Depression?
he New Deal set the standard for big government intervention. Then came the pandemic of 2020.
Read moreFor Once, Wall Street is Optimistic. That Might Not Be Crazy.
Any look at the news suggests that we’re in the early stages of a society-changing response to an unpredictable virus that will have vastly negative consequences for the economy, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
Read moreThe Fed's Unprecedented Bailout of Everyone and Everything Could Prevent Total Collapse
The Fed understood even before Congress that the health-crisis of the pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis caused by the shelter-in-place orders and shuttering of businesses, travel and events would easily morph into a financial crisis that could be magnitudes greater than what happened in 2008-2009.
Read moreThis Market Chaos Is Unlike Anything We’ve Seen Before. But Remember to Breathe
For weeks, I watched the evolving coronavirus crisis the way one observes an avalanche: it looks distant until suddenly it is upon you. I was inclined to take advantage and “buy the dips.” Then, something snapped: I started selling. I wanted cash. I panicked.
There. I said it.
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