Economy. 5 notes.

I often wonder how accurate a lot of economic analysis and commentary about India really is, given the fact that India is not really one country. It is many countries in one. Some of our states are as big as other countries. Some of our states are bigger than other countries. Then there is the other problem. When you…

Interesting paper from Ken Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang:

Despite these parallels, China is not Japan. The structure of leverage differs: Japan’s crisis centred on private banks and corporations, whereas China’s vulnerabilities are more concentrated in local governments and state-linked entities. China also retains greater administrative capacity to postpone loss recognition and prevent outright financial sector collapse.

China also has other advantages that Japan lacked. Productivity growth remains stronger, and China sits near the global frontier in several fast-growing sectors, including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and more recently, artificial intelligence. These factors may help prevent a full-scale replication of Japan’s stagnation.

But the differences cut both ways. China is ageing faster than Japan did in the 1990s, and as a still-developing country, it lacks Japan’s extensive social safety net. Moreover, newer growth engines, no matter how dynamic, are still small relative to real estate and infrastructure. Rapidly shifting from one export-led boom to another is unlikely to substitute fully for a domestic demand shortfall in an economy of China’s size.

The US Supreme Court rules that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. Trump decides to double down.

💯 We are headed for an age of anxiety, grievances, and disillusionment, and I don’t think our systems, as they are designed, are equipped to handle the tsunami of angst:

THERE is still time for the cheerful and the gloomy to disagree, sincerely, about the net impact on employment from automation and artificial intelligence. Perhaps AI will unleash a job-creating economic boom for the ages, as boosters maintain. Maybe on balance the doom-mongers are right, and grim legions of algorithm-guided bots and robots will conquer one industry (and profession) after another.

One outcome is not up for debate. Across the industrialised world, wise politicians are braced for soaring public anxiety about change. Whether AI’s long-run effects are benign or cruel, many citizens are about to find once-valued skills and credentials surplus to the requirements of the economy. Even as new jobs are created, some flesh-and-blood workers may lack autonomy, or indeed dignity, if they feel they are serving AI masters.

An essay exploring the history, economics, and politics of tariffs, prompted by the re-imposition of sweeping new trade barriers. The request called for a detailed, nuanced, and fact-checked analysis covering the evolution of tariffs, their successes and failures, the spectrum of economic opinion, key research and…