A roundup of the best economic posts on the Web
Inflation in China
Ed Yardeni (with a hat tip to WSJ Real Time Economics) scoffs at Chinese claims that U.S. quanitative easing is behind that country's surge in prices:
"The fact is that China's inflation problem is homegrown. No one does quantitative easing better than the Chinese. As I've noted previously, over the past two years through November, China's international reserves, bank reserves, and M1 are up 47.6%, 51.9%, and 57.1%."
The macroeconomic effects of the new Fiat labour contract
From VoxEu: "Workers at a Fiat plant in Turin recently voted to approve a new, innovative labour contract that promises higher wages and new investments in exchange for tighter discipline and oversight. This column says that if such a model of industrial negotiations were adopted across Italy, employment would rise in both the short and medium term."
The puzzle of China's rising household saving rate
Also from VoxEU, a study that shows a surprisingly strong savings rates among younger consumers:
"...[S]aving rates have risen across the board in urban China, but especially among households with relatively younger and older household heads. That has led to an unusual "U-shaped" age-saving profile, where the saving rates are higher at the two ends of the age distribution of household heads. Typically, one would expect saving rates to increase with the household head's age, peaking prior to his or her retirement, and then turning negative in retirement."
The decline of American economists and the European cultural revolution
At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Frances Woolley looks at the decline of econlit from North American researchers:
"In 1991, two thirds of the articles in Econlit, a comprehensive index of academic economic research, were written by people based in North America. By 2006, that share had dropped by one third to 45 percent. These numbers are taken from a recent working paper by Cardoso, Guimaraes and Zimmermann. Their evidence suggests that the relative decline in North American share has come about because of a substantial increase in the productivity of European economists, and also because of an increase in Asian publication rates."
Homeowners get screwed, lawyers get played, banks make profit: Where's the outrage?
From NewDeal 2.0, a lawyer who represents U.S. homeowners in foreclosure details the tactics and abuses undertaken by big U.S. financial institutions determined to win at all costs.
"Perhaps the largest frustration for me in this work is to experience on a daily basis the games that the servicers play in the foreclosure process. I am constantly frustrated by how much of my time is spent in dealing with the servicers' antics, thus reducing the number of homeowners that I and my colleagues are able to help."