(8/2/1015) The plunge of China’s stock market that has taken place since June 2015 has received a lot of attention. All the commentary says not only that the Chinese authorities have taken a variety of artificial measures to try to boost the market on the way down but also that they did the same during the huge run-up in stock prices between mid-2014 and mid-2015, when the Shanghai stock exchange composite index more than doubled. The finger-wagging implications are that the Chinese authorities, particularly the stock market regulator, have not learned how to let the market operate and that they had only themselves to blame for the bubble in the first place.
Category Archives: financial regulation
8 Policy Recommendations for Newly Elected Members of Congress
On December 3, 2014, I participated in a panel of Harvard University’s Bipartisan Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress. After establishing that the median US household has not shared in recent strong economic gains, I went on to consider policy remedies.
I offered the Congressmen eight policy recommendations. Some will sound popular, some very unpopular; some associated with “liberals”, some with “conservatives.” I would claim that they all have in common heavy support from economists, regardless of party – even the very unpopular ones.
It Takes More than Two to Tango: Cry, But Not for Argentina, nor for the Holdouts
U.S. federal courts have ruled that Argentina is prohibited from making payments to fulfill 2005 and 2010 agreements with its creditors to restructure its debt, so long as it is not also paying a few creditors that have all along been holdouts from those agreements. The judgment is likely to stick, because the judge (Thomas Griesa, in New York) told American banks on June 27 that it would be illegal for them to transfer Argentina’s payments to the 92 per cent of creditors who agreed to be restructured and because the US Supreme Court in June declined to review the lower court rulings.