My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.
I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings.
If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man - save highly polluting coal.
Sadly, I do my homework. I've a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I'll read C. Fred Bergsten's defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It's embarrassing to admit.
Our engagement through international economics, trade, these trade agreements, is vital and is linked to our national security. This is a lesson we learned from the '30s, it is a lesson we learned post-World War II, and it plays to our strengths.
To the extent that the Trump administration doesn't like a strong dollar, something has got to give, and just yelling at other countries for devaluing when you're raising rates and they're cutting rates is not going to work.
There is no way out of playing by the rules of the international economy if you wish to be a part of it.
In my early days, I wrote my dissertation for MIT at the London School of Economics, really under James Meade, but my dissertation was five chapters on the theory of capital movement, but it didn't mention money.
I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.
National security must include international economics as it became clear that the U. S. economy was powerfully affective by economic policies in dozens of other countries.
When governments manipulate exchange rates to affect currency markets, they undermine the honest efforts of countries that wish to compete fairly in the global marketplace. Supply and demand are distorted by artificial prices conveyed through contrived exchange rates. Businesses fail as legitimately earned profits become currency losses.
Is it to be imagined that an ordinary citizen or even an Assemblyman from Rhode Island in estimating the policy of paper money, ever considered or cared, in what light the measure would be viewed in France or Holland; or even in Massachusetts or Connecticut?
I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.
Growth at home depends on growth abroad.
Trade never balances. It hasn’t since 1776.
We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.
National border lines are much easier to draw than economic lines.
I don't think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.
We are particularly poor at the open economy issues.
My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize with systems rather than people.
My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.
I have learned as much in the last three years as in any other comparable period of my life, but with an added realisation of how little over a half century of study one has in fact managed to learn of the whole range of economic policy issues.
The SSRC committee turned attention from team research for building a model of the United States to doing one for world trade in order to investigate the international transmission mechanism.
I mean, I'm very serious with my kids about them comprehending the intricacies of global finance.
Globalization is about liberalized imports and exports, which makes India export our best natural wealth and import the junk and wasted pollution of international production, including of the Western economies.
