It’s time to make it official. The downside risks we have been warning of over the past several months are now coming to pass.

China has been moving — very slowly, but the speed is very much dependent on their ability to withstand reforms. The idea of forcing China and other countries to move on the currency front is...

Over the 2004-05 interval, looming bond market perils appear to pose the most serious challenges for [leveraged] consumers and property markets — possibly even resulting in a new deflation scare,

Trade liberalization is a plus for global growth, no question about it.

The property bubble is nearing its end. This is the end of the great American spending binge.

The risk is that he will be blind-sided, as his predecessors were, very early in his tenure by something he is not all that well prepared for and by something that the markets do not...

The recession is not over. We will probably have a ‘double dip,’ another downturn, by spring.

[For all of China’s efforts to create a vibrant domestic market, its economy is highly dependent on exports. China’s economic model these days] is very much a levered play on the staying power of the...

I fully expect that the Chinese officials will address these tension points, but will not waver from their steadfast commitment on a medium- to longer-term basis of an open capital account and currency convertibility.

For the last three years, we’ve had a two-engine world: the Chinese producer and the American consumer. Both engines are going to slow down. The debate will be whether this two-engine global 747 is in...

Mine didn’t even rhyme, … But I loved him. He was a great man. I miss him. Put that in, will you.

When he leaves … he will take away 18 years of confidence the markets have invested in him.

I think there’s every reason to believe that another jobless recovery could be in the offing in the years immediately ahead — one that would take a comparable toll on consumer demand.

The vulnerability of the over-extended American consumer can hardly be taken lightly. That could well be a big problem for the rest of a U.S.-centric global economy.

It’s important to stay focused on the interplay between the consumer and the overextended housing market and sharp increases in energy prices. That will be key as to whether or not the U.S. economy will...

Growth has been chronically weak when compared with any expansion of the past 40 years.

Sound the alarm, it’s Allan McMahon!

The major risk to the global economy is complacency. We cannot keep thinking that we can shrug off the deficit and the property bubble.

Like it or not, the experience of the 1980s demonstrates that supply-side tax cuts are not self-financing. In my opinion, similar results can be expected from the multi-year tax cuts now on the table in...

China’s senior leadership gets it while many outside the country do not.

In my view, the perils of another burst asset bubble far outweigh the costs of another recession,

That underscores the possibility of yet another shoe to fall in world growth — all the more reason to stress the protracted nature of this global downturn.

Once viewed as an unparalleled opportunity, the Chinese miracle is now being viewed as a threat by both the U.S. and Japan.

This is the year to watch out carefully for the end of the great American spending binge.

[This] is just another nail in the coffin for the world economy.

Out here in Asia,

To the extent that hiring in high-wage, developed economies continues to lag, the sustainability of any impetus to private consumption can be drawn into serious question.

The Fed’s going to move 25 basis points; the question is what about after that,

With global trade screeching to such a standstill, so, too, should the external demand contributions of most major economies around the world,

It won’t be a huge dramatic bursting, but it will be felt this year.

I do not think that China is going to run the risk of accelerating its pace of opening up its capital markets because of adverse consequences in the global economy.

Why should the victim who has never received a dime sit back while the civil rights violator gets his job and back pay?

I continue to find Germany, by far Europe’s biggest economy and still the third-largest economy in the world, the most interesting story of all. Germany, despite its bad press, is very much on the move.

There is good reason to believe that a sharp weakening in the value of the U.S. currency is essential to the global rebalancing that must begin to take place if the world’s current account imbalances...

By staying disciplined with regard to inflationary policy, the Fed nips any inflationary expectations in the bud.

Conventional wisdom has it that globalization is a win-win but that is increasingly looking like a pipe dream. There is no escaping the concerns that workers in high-wage countries have.

Never in modern history has the world’s leading economic power tried to do so much with so little. Now Washington is upping the ante as it opens the fiscal spigot to cope with post-Katrina reconstruction...

that doesn’t mean that there cannot be some adjustments made along the way.

Borrowing from physics, the last thing an unstable system needs is a shock. And yet the risks of just such a disturbance have never seemed higher. Far-fetched as it seems, the possibility of a more...

We’ve gone from one bubble, in stocks, to another, in housing.

I honestly believe that if China were to revalue [its currency] upward by 10 percent — a change I do not expect nor advise — its exports would suffer minimal loss of market share,

As the prospects of a full-blown oil shock rise, the prospects of outright global recession in 2005 loom more and more likely.

If that’s the economic model, China is in trouble.

Europe looks at China as more of a strategic partner than a competitive threat so it has stayed more out of the currency debate than the U.S..

Without the consumer, revival remains all too dependent on tenuous support from China and [business investment].

Unfortunately, the SARS effect is concentrated on Asia — long the fastest-growing region in the world and the one area that essentially had been keeping the global economy afloat. To the extent that this source...

The United States has long drawn comfort from the quality differential of its educational system. However, in the Internet Age with its ubiquitous diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and technological change, that may turn out to...

To the extent such a payback is likely after the current spending burst, it could act as a sharp depressant on overall demand growth in subsequent quarters, … That development, in the context of a...

The same distortions, in my view, could well be explaining a lot of the recent strength in the remainder of the U.S. data flow. If that’s the case, all it will take is for the...

There is a dangerous degree of complacency, and out of that comes a surprise that does the most damage to the global economy.