Category Archives: financial crisis

Five phrases coined by Carmen Reinhart

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November 11, 2021 — Last night, Carmen Reinhart, who is on leave from Harvard Kennedy School to serve as the World Bank’s Chief Economist, gave the Gordon Lecture in the HKS Forum.  (Video here.)

I was the moderator. In preparing my questions for her, I was struck by how many memorable phrases Carmen has coined in her research career.  Here is a list of five such phrases.  Three of them have their own Wikipedia entries, which is remarkable. And that doesn’t even count publications of hers that also have entries. read more

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The G20 agenda, as the pandemic continues

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August 28, 2021 — Italy hosts the G20 this year.  The 2021 Summit of the Heads of Government will take place in Rome in October. Officials of member countries, including the finance ministers and central bank governors, are preparing.

The G20 meeting will come at a time of great uncertainty as concerns the health and economic effects of the pandemic, midway through its 2nd year.  Although the mechanisms of international cooperation have been badly bruised by events of recent years, they are more important than ever, in light of the interconnectedness across nations that the pandemic so vividly demonstrates. read more

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Black Swans Like COVID-19 are Predictable

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March 30, 2020 —   Events like the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the US housing crash of 2007-09, and the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, are called “black swans”: in each case, few people were able to predict them reliably, at least not with precision.  But they were known unknowns, not unknown unknowns.  That is, in each case, knowledgeable analysts were fully aware that such a thing could happen, even that it was likely to happen eventually.  They could not predict that the event would happen with high probability in any given year.  But the consequences of each of these events were severe, and predictably so.  Thus, policymakers should have listened to the warnings and should have taken steps in advance. They could have helped avert or mitigate disaster if they had done so. read more

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