Shoppers at a mall in New Delhi in 2009.VIJAY MATHUR
A roundup of the best economic posts on the Web
How India is learning to love a strong rupee
"The Indian rupee is soaring - up 9 percent against the dollar in the last 16 months. That has taken a toll on exports like textiles by making them more expensive on the world market. And the strong rupee poses longer-term threats of overheating the economy. .... But instead of fighting currency appreciation, as Brazil and some other countries have done, India has been willing to let the rupee rise - for now, at least.
Gloom and Dr. Doom
In a New York Times Op-ed, Paul Krugman says historians will look back at next week's likely triumph of the Republicans in U.S. midterm elections as, "a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness."
Nouriel Roubini is equally pessimistic about the political gridlock gripping the beltway, and fears it will take a severe fiscal crisis - likely a bond shock - to awaken politicians. He says the Republican party is "trapped in a belief in voodoo economics, the economic equivalent of creationism."
U.S. grads discover the law of dimishing returns
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor's degree. ....[T]e growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. "
The loonie and the MERT
Mike Moffat from Worthwhile Canadian Initiative:
"About a decade ago when I was giving econometrics tutorials at the University of Rochester I asked my students to calculate the correlation between oil prices and the value of the Canadian dollar relative to greenback. Out of that was born MERT - my toy exchange rate predictor. .... "It has been about 6 months since we last looked at MERT - my toy for examining the relationship between oil prices, interest rates and the value of the Canadian dollar (relative to the greenback). It turns out that in 2010 the toy has done a very good job at 'predicting' the value of the Canadian dollar, as on average it has only been off by 4/10ths of a cent."
The failure problem with industrial policy
"The reason industrial policy has this problem is that it is explicitly geared towards creating jobs. Once those jobs are created, the goal for policy-makers becomes preserving those jobs. This is the antithesis of creative destruction, and a huge impediment to progress."
Eds note: Be sure to follow this read with Stephen Gordon's recent post on Economy Lab: Economic policy is about more than just jobs
A new path to a low-carbon economy
Jeffrey Sachs on Project Syndicate
"The time has come for the US, China, India, and other major economies to declare how they will foster their own transition to a low-carbon economy. A small and gradually rising carbon tax that funds a feed-in tariff system could win political support in the US. It could also help to foster consensus among the major coal-based economies, including China and India."