Adam Tooze's Blog, page 37
November 24, 2020
Biden will have the presidency. But Republicans still have the power
President Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 3 November election, which appear to be over, provided his opponents with a source of sadistic amusement. Trump’s self-humiliation in the eyes of the liberal world is complete. To his followers, of course, the fight goes on. And his Republican colleagues have reason to be cheerful. We should not allow the schadenfreude to distract us from this basic fact. Yes, Biden defeated Trump. But in that same election the Democrats failed to gain the majority of seats that the new president needs to actually put an end to the era of Republican dominance. Things might still go right in Georgia, but that would leave the Senate hanging by a thread.
Four times, at moments of historic crisis, the US electorate has handed the White House to a Democrat – 1916, 1932, 2008 and 2020. But this year is the first time it has done so without also handing the Democrats a clear majority in Congress. The basic difference between Biden and his predecessors is that he lacks a solid political basis from which to wield power.
Read the full article at The Guardian
November 21, 2020
The West’s Constitutional Crises Threaten the Economy’s Last Best Hope
In the looking-glass moment of November 2020 we should perhaps no longer be surprised to see the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, and the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, demanding more fiscal action to address the coronavirus crisis. But one does have to pinch oneself. Did we ever dream that we would see the central bank guardians of price stability taking on the role of lead cheerleaders for massive fiscal activism?
Earlier in the year they hardly needed to make the case. Fiscal activism was the order of the day. Central banks were crucial in stabilizing the financial markets in March and April. But the main burden of the coronavirus response lay with fiscal policy. The pandemic has triggered a crisis of the real economy first and foremost, not a collapse of credit. The U.S. CARES Act was a prompt and massive stimulus measure. At first the European Union flailed. But then in July the Europeans agreed a quasi-constitutional settlement, with a common program of borrowing to fund the joint Recovery Pact. This would provide the fiscal backdrop to enable Europe to achieve not just a recovery, but the first steps toward its much-vaunted Green Deal. With fiscal policy taking the lead, central banks could play a supporting role, juicing financial markets with quantitative easing.
Read the full article at Foreign Policy
November 18, 2020
Das Biden-Team und das Schäuble-Trauma
Corona – Das Virus und die Wirtschaft – Folge #35
In den USA bereit sich so ziemlich alles auf einen Präsident Biden vor – mit Ausnahme Donald Trumps und seiner Unterstützer. Welche Folgen hat das für die Fähigkeit Joe Bidens, den Kampf gegen die Corona Wirtschaftskrise vorzubereiten? Außerdem in dieser Folge: Warum das Biden-Team argwöhnisch auf die EU und besonders Deutschland schaut.
Post-Covid Economics with the Talking Politics Podcast
This week a special edition from the Bristol Festival of Economics with Helen Thompson and Adam Tooze talking about what might follow the pandemic. From vaccines to changing patterns of employment, from action on climate to new tensions with China, we explore what the long-term effects of 2020 might be. Plus we discuss what options are open to a Biden administration: with the Georgia run-offs to come and the disease still spreading, how much wriggle room has he got?
November 17, 2020
Chartbook # 2 Nov 18 2020
Second in the series of chartbooks with charts, links and news of vaccines, an accelerating pandemic and dramatic news on the trade front from Asia.
Download here:
Tooze-Chartbook-2-18-Nov-2020Download
Check it out. Let me know what you think. Spread the word!
November 15, 2020
Chartbook # 1
Introducing Adam Tooze Chartbook # 1.
Vaccine refrigeration, Biden’s economics team, IMF fiscal reports, Turkey under financial pressure, Nagorno-Karabakh, Indian potato inflation and the market for Gerhard Richter paintings … they were all hot news in the last few days.
But on twitter it can be hard to follow. It makes me dizzy too.
To help bring some order to the flow, I am experimenting with a new format: a chartbook that collects significant images, charts and links that I tweeted out over the last few days etc, in an accessible format.
You can download the Adam Tooze Chartbook # 1 here: Chartbook 1 15 Nov 2020
It includes great stuff, ranging from investments in freezer farms to the IMF’s assessment of 2020 green stimulus programs and reviews of the latest work on the economics of slavery.
All the images are linked. Some are from publicly available sources. Some are from behind paywalls. I’m advertising great journalistic and analytical work here. In any event the images are out there circulating for free on twitter and I thought folks might enjoy the selection.
This is an experiment, which may ultimately form the backbone of a regular newsletter. Check it out.
November 13, 2020
This global crisis: Capitalism in and beyond the pandemic – University of Sydney
What will the post-pandemic world look like?
2020 has revealed the deep connections between our intersecting crises of economy, health, care, gender, race and climate. The course of the pandemic has been shaped by long-standing inequalities in our households, communities, workplaces and financial systems.
Governments have responded with experimental fiscal and monetary policies that at least temporarily bypass the usual constraints while at the same time implementing new forms of repression at borders, elections and protests around the world. The Covid-19 crisis will drive political economic transformations that will reverberate around a world in which environmental risks are set to multiply.
As the battle of ideas and blueprints for the post-pandemic world intensify, the Department of Political Economy’s 13th annual Wheelwright lecture was delivered by a panel of three global experts who discussed the lessons of 2020 and what might come next.
Listen to other School of Social & Political Science recording via their Soundcloud
November 12, 2020
Discussion with Wolfgang Schäuble
Wenige Tage nach der US-Präsidentschaftswahl diskutieren Bundestagspräsident Wolfgang Schäuble und der britisch-amerikanische Wirtschaftshistoriker Adam Tooze über die westlich geprägte Weltordnung und die Zukunft der transatlantischen Beziehungen. Es moderiert Susanne Beyer, Der SPIEGEL. In Kooperation mit Der SPIEGEL
November 9, 2020
The Limits of Victory
On Sat., Nov. 7, 2020, at 11:24 a.m., three and a half days after the polls closed, the U.S. television networks finally called the result of America’s 46th presidential election. If you were not on Twitter or watching TV, you heard the cheering from the streets. Within minutes, across the country, cities erupted in celebration of the Biden-Harris victory. By 11:40 a.m., even the pro-Trump Fox News channel was acknowledging what it preferred to call the “predicted result.”
Four years on from 2016, this is how the end of the Trump administration began. For 52 percent of Americans, it was an extraordinary relief. For 48 percent who supported the president, it was a bitter and barely comprehensible defeat that many, including the president, are still struggling to accept.
There are ways of downplaying the drama of events. It was an election held under unusual circumstances. But the outcome was not, in the end, a surprise. The Democrats won the popular vote as they have in the last seven of eight elections. Once again, the polls underestimated Donald Trump’s support. But Trump is a wild card and his relatively narrow defeat is well within the margin of error. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is the most obvious of candidates. He is, by his own telling, a transitional figure, who by defeating Trump clears the path of demographic destiny.
Read the full article at Zeit
America’s Economy Is Fragile. So Is Biden’s Economic Team.
As the transition to the next administration under Joe Biden begins, several lists of potential economics team members are already in circulation. Longtime Biden advisors Jared Bernstein and Ben Harris are in the frame. So too is Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, formerly of Hillary Clinton’s transition team. Lael Brainard at the U.S. Federal Reserve is one of the most experienced technocrats of her generation. She is odds on to be the first woman to serve as U.S. treasury secretary.
These are the intellectual picks. At the other end of the spectrum are operators like the businessman Jeff Zients, Barack Obama’s Mr. Fix-It and the head of his National Economic Council. Zients is one of four co-chairs in the Biden transition team and a “staunch capitalist” vouched for by the Business Roundtable.
The economic agenda of the Biden administration will likely be defined by such splits in personal background and by the wider left-center axis that runs through the Democratic Party. At this stage, these divides seem much more pronounced than under Obama. The economics team of Obama’s early years was taken straight from Bill Clinton’s roster. When Biden’s team announced this year that it was taking advice from Larry Summers, Clinton’s last treasury secretary and a key figure of continuity in the Obama administration, it provoked a storm of protest from the left. Since then, Summers has removed himself from consideration for jobs in the Biden administration.
Read the full article at Foreign Policy.
Adam Tooze's Blog
- Adam Tooze's profile
- 767 followers
