The Hour of the Technocrats has arrived. In desperation from debt crises that their gridlocked political systems have created, Italy and Greece both in November chose new Prime Ministers who are technocratic economists rather than politicians: Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, respectively. One can even describe them as professors: Monti has been president of the prestigious Bocconi University when not a European Commissioner in Brussels, and Papademos has been my colleague at Harvard Kennedy School in the year since he finished his term as Deputy Governor of the European Central Bank (even teaching a class I usually teach).
How Negotiators at Durban Can Agree Emissions Targets
The parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are meeting once again in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9. The period covered by the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012 and the clock is running out on negotiations for a successor agreement. Progress at Copenhagen two years ago and Cancun one year ago was slow. Negotiations have been blocked by a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. The United States is at loggerheads with the developing world, especially China–now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG)–and India.
The Easy Question in Financial Regulation
Many questions in the field of financial regulation are hard to answer: Would the separation of commercial banking and investment banking help prevent crises? To what extent should individual consumers be protected against foolishly borrowing too much? Should Credit Default Swaps be regulated out of existence? What should regulators do about patterns of high executive compensation that is evidently not a reward for performance? I have views on these questions, just as other observers do. But in these cases I see the arguments on both sides.
