Time (June 23)
“Life expectancy across the country plummeted by nearly two years from 2018 to 2020, the largest decline since 1943, when American troops were dying in World War II.” While life expectancy also dropped in many countries during the same period, “the average loss of life expectancy in the U.S. was nearly nine times greater than the average in 16 other developed nations, whose residents can now expect to live 4.7 years longer than Americans.”
Tags: Decline, Developed nations, Dying, Life expectancy, Plummeted, U.S., WWII
Washington Post (August 2)
“China’s state-driven economic model has created many problems. Monetary policy isn’t one of them.” On the heels of the Fed’s rate cut, the ECB “looks poised to follow suit in September” and “the temptation is high for other central banks to fall in line.” But often they’re “canceling out each other’s efforts,” which is one reason the dollar didn’t fall with the latest rate cut. “Developed nations play out what is a zero-sum game.” In the process, they’re “using up the ammunition they have available to support their economies in the event of a downturn.” In contrast, the PBOC has avoided playing the rate cut game and “China’s 10-year government bond yield is relatively unchanged since the end of 2018.”
Tags: Canceling out, China Economic model, Developed nations, Dollar, Downturn, ECB, Fed, Monetary policy, PBOC, Rate cut, Temptation, Zero-sum game
Financial Times (January 13)
“Watch Japan” in the next year to find out more about the inevitability of Larry Summer’s secular stagnation thesis. “Virtually all western economies have seen wages stagnate or fall in recent years.” If Japan, “the world champion of secular stagnation,” succeeds in raising household incomes, this will present the hope that other developed nations can also escape the grip of secular stagnation.
Washington Post (March 20)
“Our long economic winter is a pleasant summer in distant places.” Developed nations have battled economic insecurity over the past several years, but things have actually gotten better in much of the world. Extreme poverty “has been declining in every developing region” and, for the first time since 1981, the rate of extreme poverty is less than 50% in Africa. The UN’s first Millennium Development Goal was to halve the global rate of extreme poverty by 2015. That goal was accomplished in 2010. With these achievements in mind, things aren’t as bad as they might otherwise seem.
Tags: Africa, Developed nations, Developing nations, Extreme poverty, Millennium Development Goal, UN
