Category: Global Economic Governance

STEM Education Falls Short: The Problem is Too Few Jobs, Not Too Little Education

SOURCE ITEMS

According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. About 26 percent of physical science majors; 15 percent of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors; 10 percent of psychology majors; and 7 percent of social science majors were employed in STEM.

 Census Bureau Reports Majority of STEM College Graduates Do Not Work in STEM Occupations, U.S. Census Bureau, July 2014.

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Since cohort-wage profiles display a similar pattern, these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s.

 Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand. The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000, American Economic Review, 2014

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Chart-Labor Force Participation Rate Trend

The labor force is anticipated to grow by 8.5 million, an annual growth rate of 0.5 percent, over the 2012–2022 period. The growth in the labor force during 2012–2022 is projected to be smaller than in the previous 10-year period, 2002–2012, when the labor force grew by 10.1 million, a 0.7-percent annual growth rate.

 Labor force projections to 2022: the labor force participation rate continues to fall, Monthly Labor Review, December 2013.

 COMMENTS

We now live in a world economy in which economic processes and trends are global. Global economic growth is constrained and will continue to be into the foreseeable future. As a consequence, current patterns of investment, domestic and global, will not generate a sufficient number of jobs to produce anything near global full employment at living wages.

Economic activity in the U.S. does not constitute a separate economy, so U.S. economy policies cannot produce full employment and high wages in the U.S. while the rest of the world is stuck with high rates of unemployment and low wages.   Investment follows profits.  Profits are maximized by producing in low income places in the world economy and selling in high income places.  Unfettered transnational flows of capital and commodities combined with preventing low-skill working people from easily crossing national boundaries in search of work gives the world’s investors the legal framework with which to manage the world’s labor supply to their advantage.

A Gathering Consensus About the Limits to National Economic Policy?

SOURCE ITEMS

Despite the subsequent decision of the Group of 20 in 2009 on the need for rules to supervise what is now a globally integrated financial system, world leaders have spent the last five years in retreat, resorting to unilateral actions that have made a mockery of global coordination. Already, we have forgotten the basic lesson of the crash: Global problems need global solutions. And because we failed to learn from the last crisis, the world’s bankers are carrying us toward the next one.

Gordon Brown, Stumbling Toward the Next Crash, New York Times, Published: December 18, 2013.  (Gordon Brown, a Labour member of the British Parliament, is a former chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister.)

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Nothing endangers globalization more than the yawning governance gap – the dangerous disparity between the national scope of political accountability and the global nature of markets for goods, capital, and many services – that has opened up in recent decades. When markets transcend national regulation, as with today’s globalization of finance, market failure, instability, and crisis is the result.

Dani Rodrik, National Governments, Global Citizens, Project Syndicate, March 12, 2013.  (Dani Rodrik is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.)

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Around the world, policies, technologies, and extended learning processes have combined to erode barriers to economic interaction among countries. Pick any indicator: trade relative to global GDP, capital flows relative to the global capital stock, and so forth – all are rising.

But economic policies are set at the national level, and, with a few notable exceptions like trade negotiations and the tracking of terrorist funding and money laundering, policymakers set goals with a view to benefiting the domestic economy. And these policies (or policy shifts) are increasingly affecting other economies and the global system, giving rise to what might be called “policy externalities” – that is, consequences that extend outside policymakers’ target environment.

Michael Spence, The Blurry Frontiers of Economic Policy, Project Syndicate, September 19, 2013.  (Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong.)

COMMENTS

In certain quarters of American society, one can find rejoicing over the condition of the U.S. economy.  Just today, the Federal Reserve began its long anticipated tapering of its bond buying program for stimulating the U.S. economy, citing enough economic progress to do so.

Given the quotes above, one has to wonder, however, whether a small change in Fed policy in the U.S. will have much effect one way or the other.   The bond buying program is only one in a global sea of public policy mechanisms that affect the U.S. economy.  And some of those other policy mechanisms are being manipulated by actors in the world economy that are quite powerful – the EU, China, the BRICS nations.

It must also be pointed out that the effects of the Fed’s decisions are not contained by U.S. political borders.  Those consequences are spread across the world economy through the global financial system, and some or many nations will be harmed by those effects.  Actions bring reactions and we do not know whether those reactions will conspire with Fed policy to improve employment and incomes in the U.S. or conspire against Fed policy to further damage employment and income growth in the U.S.

See my Blog Posts under Global Economic Governance for more sources and comments.

Economists at a Crossroads: The Ideology of National Policy Making Sovereignty vs. the Reality of a Global Economy

 SOURCE ITEMS

When Sweden’s Riksbank was founded in 1668, followed by the Bank of England in 1694, the motivation was that a single economy should have a single central bank. Over the next three centuries, as the benefits of instituting a monopoly over money creation became more widely recognized, a slew of central banks were established, one for each politically bounded economy.

What was not anticipated was that globalization would erode these boundaries. As a result, we have returned to a past from which we tried to escape – a single economy, in this case the world, with multiple money-creating authorities.

This is clearly maladaptive, and it explains why the massive injections of liquidity by advanced-country central banks are failing to jump-start economies and create more jobs.

Kaushik Basu (Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank and Professor of Economics at Cornell University), Two Policy Prescriptions for the Global Crisis, Project Syndicate, April 23, 2013.

COMMENTS

Since the economic crisis of 2008, most economists have been telling political leaders and their constituents what they want to hear – that national policy making sovereignty is still viable.  (Implement the right policies and your nation will do well no matter what is happening in the rest of the world.)

The time is up for this kind of political expediency.  With more than four years of policy failure now weighing on the world’s political leaders and no promising economic corners in sight, economists can only lose the last of their credibility by continuing to tell policy makers that they are the sole masters of the destinies of their peoples.

The choice for the field of economics is clear: take a chance that some political leaders and some constituencies are ready to acknowledge that national policy making sovereignty is a thing of the past.  That’s the only approach that will save the field of economics from becoming an object of contempt.

See related source items and comments in earlier blog posts:

Accumulating Evidence Shows That the World’s Nation-Centered Economic Policy Making Paradigm is Obsolete, March 21, 2012.

The World Economy’s Demolition Derby of Competing and Overlapping Economic Policy Making Entities, January 22, 2012.

What Happens In Vegas Doesn’t Stay In Vegas: National Policies Have Global Consequences, November 30, 2011.

Fragmented and Weakened Global Governance Perpetuates the World’s Employment Crisis, September 9, 2011.

The ‘All’ in ‘We’re All in This Together’ Is the Whole World

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

… that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect … a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

… when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system.

 Thomas Friedman, New Rules, New York Times, : September 8, 2012.

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Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more….“Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

Voilà, a Factory in Your Garage, Reading File, New York Times, February 6, 2010.

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Both cyclical and structural effects appear evident in the recession, suggesting that some features of the U.S. economy can benefit from stimulatory monetary and fiscal policy, while others are more permanently damaged and unlikely to respond to such policies.

 Eric Swanson, Structural and Cyclical Economic Factors, Economic Newsletter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, June 11, 2012.

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After all, borders are not impermeable. On the contrary, globalization – the immense flow across borders of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, goods, services, currencies, commodities, television and radio signals, drugs, weapons, emails, viruses (computer and biological), and a good deal else – is a defining reality of our time. Few of the challenges that it raises can be met unilaterally; more often than not, cooperation, compromise, and a degree of multilateralism are essential.

Richard N. Haass (Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), To the Victors Go the Foils, Project Syndicate, Apr. 25, 2012.

COMMENTS

When there are no limits to competition, competition destroys the commons – whether that commons is arable land, fish stocks in the ocean, the earth’s breathable air, or the economy in which all the world’s working people must earn an income sufficient to support a family and contribute to the well-being of their communities.

Structural factors that rob working people of living wage jobs are not confinedto the U.S., are not confined to any nation. There are national and local variations, but, fundamentally, the structural problems are global in scope and must be addressed through globally coordinated efforts.

A global system in which one nation outdoes others for a few years, and then another nation outdoes others for a few years, while the global trend is greater hardship for the greater number, is not one the American people should want and it is not one in which a high standard of living can be sustained.

Hard Working? Creative? Strong Language and Computer Skills? Earn Up to $4 Per Hour in the New Global Labor Force

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

The job didn’t pay much: four bucks an hour if you really hustled. But for Catherine Fraser, a recent community college graduate from Mountain View looking to pick up a little extra spending cash, the work was a hoot.

… said analyst Martin Schneider with 451 Research. “Like manufacturing has done forever, crowd-labor lets us break down a job into tiny components, where one bit of fact-checking or writing a few sentences is now the equivalent of gluing that chip onto a computer board.”

… The larger question — and one with huge global implications as crowd-sourcing redefines and in some cases kills traditional jobs and long-established labor-management models — is whether the crowd-labor pool could essentially become one big worldwide digital sweatshop. While industry studies show average hourly earnings across all categories range from about $7 in India to $16 in Western Europe, the fast-growing segment of micro-taskers earn half that on average, and some make only $1.50 an hour.

Patrick May, ‘Crowd labor’ helps spur social networking revolution, San Jose Mercury News, Updated: 05/01/2012.

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Series Index May

Series Index Apr

Rate of Change

Employment Index

50.8

54.2

 Slower

Business Activity/Production

55.6

54.6

 Faster

New Orders

55.5

53.5

 Faster
Source: May 2012 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business, Institute for Supply Management, June 5, 2012

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For Great Wall, a private sector Chinese car maker that employs 50,000 workers, the Swiss robots and other machinery that line its bright factory floor produce more than cost savings. The company hopes they will help it build cars good enough to compete with the global auto makers.

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According to Nomura, 28 percent of factory machines in China use numerical controls – one measure of automation. That may be far lower than Japan’s 83 percent, but China is growing far faster than Japan did at a comparable stage of development, says Ge Wenjie, a machinery analyst with Nomura.

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In other words, China may soon be known less for cheap Christmas toys and more for high-end medical equipment, luxury cars and jet engines.

By Don Durfee, Analysis: Robots lift China’s factories to new heights, Reuters, June 3, 2012.

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Unit labor costs fell in 23 of 47 service-providing industries, the most since 2003 …

Output per hour increased in 32 of the 47 [service-providing industries] industries studied.  In most of these industries, productivity rose as output growth was accompanied by declines or more modest increases in hours.  Several  industries posted double-digit productivity gains as a result: local as well as long-distance general freight trucking; refrigerated warehousing and storage; radio and television broadcasting; wireless telecommunications carriers; and travel agencies.

In a few industries, productivity rose despite falling output.  In industries such as postal service; couriers and messengers; video tape and disc rental; photofinishing; and newspaper, book, and directory publishers, rising labor productivity reflected declines in both labor hours and output, with hours falling more rapidly than output.

Productivity and Costs by Industry: Selected Service-Providing and Mining Industries, 2010, Economic News Release, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 31, 2012.

COMMENTS

During the 20th century each new generation of U.S. workers faced declining employment opportunities in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.  But those lost employment opportunities were offset by growing employment opportunities in government and private service sector industries.

This is no longer the case.  Job growth in government and service sector industries has slowed considerably.  Moreover, some government agencies and service sector industries are embracing new production technologies and becoming job shedders themselves.

The hallmark of the first half of the 21st century may well be a decades long global employment crisis.  National governments are still trying to apply economic remedies carried over from the 20th century in a world that is vastly different.  National economic sovereignty is gone.  Rich and poor nations alike are now joined at the economic hip in a single world economy.

Sticking with the “each nation goes it alone” strategy for addressing the global employment crisis isn’t working.  Rather than getting increasing prosperity, U.S. working families and local business owners are getting a larger share of the world’s very high level of poverty.

The practical alternative for the U.S. is to join with the world’s other nations to build institutions that coordinate national economic policies and set minimum global standards for corporate behavior, working conditions, wages and benefits.

Globalization cannot be undone, so there is no other choice.

Accumulating Evidence Shows That the World’s Nation-Centered Economic Policy Making Paradigm is Obsolete

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Chart-Global GDP Growth 2007-13, IMF

World Economic Outlook Update: Global Recovery Stalls, Downside Risks Intensify, International Monetary Fund, January 2012.

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Chart-World Trade Volume 2000 - 2011

Trade and Development Report, 2011: Post-crisis Policy Challenges in the World Economy, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

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“Last year alone the daily volume of currencies traded was 220 per cent higher than that in 2001, and 65 per cent of the transactions were cross-border ― up from 54 per cent in 1998. Since 1990 foreign direct investment increased more than six fold.”

Moisés Naím, The Dangerous Cocktail of Global Money and Local Politics, Financial Times, November 18, 2011, (published on Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website).

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“Assuming a cyclic dynamics of national economies and the interaction of different countries according to the import-export balances, we are able to investigate … the synchronization phenomenon of crises at the worldwide scale. … The results support the theory of a globalization process emerging in the decade 1970–1980, the synchronization phenomena after this period accelerates and the effect of a mesoscopic [intermediate in size] structure of communities of countries is almost dissolved in the global behavior.”

Pau Erola, Albert Diaz-Guilera, Sergio Gomez, Alex Arenas, Modeling international crisis synchronization in the World Trade Web, arXiv.org, January 10, 2012.

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“In today’s financial architecture, as with other supply chains, interdependent networks tend to concentrate in powerful hubs. For example, just two financial centers, London and New York, dominate international finance, and only 22 players conduct 90% of all global foreign-exchange trading.”

Andrew Sheng, Global Finance’s Supply-Chain Revolution, Project Syndicate, January 5, 2012.

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“So the degree of synchronisation has evolved fitfully. It is only in the most recent 1973-2006 period that we can speak meaningfully of anything resembling an international business cycle.”

Paul Ormerod, Random matrix theory and the evolution of business cycle synchronisation 1886-2006, arXiv, July 11, 2008. 

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“Globalization has made frontiers more porous. We see how one country’s policies, whether pertaining to work, the environment, public health, taxation, or myriad other issues, can have a direct impact on others. And we see such interdependence even more clearly in their economic performance: China’s annual GDP growth rate, for example, will slow by two percentage points this year, owing to sluggishness in the United States and the EU.”

Javier Solana, Whose Sovereignty?, Project Syndicate, March 12, 2012.

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“At the news conference Monday, Mr. Zhou said China was especially worried about Europe and its chronic sovereign-debt crisis … The world economy is highly globalized with a very active flow of capital worldwide,” he said. “All of these factors will have an impact on our monetary policy.’”

Ian Johnson, China Talks of More Lending but Less Currency Growth, New York Times, March 12, 2012.

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“Undoubtedly politicians should do a much better job of explaining to their constituents’ that what happens beyond the borders of their country-or city has implications for what happens inside their homes.”

Moisés Naím, The Dangerous Cocktail of Global Money and Local Politics, Financial Times, November 18, 2011 ( published on Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website).

COMMENTS

It is becoming increasingly clear that merging the world’s 20th century national economies into our 21st century world economy has raced ahead of merging national economic policy making institutions into a global economic policy making system.  The consequences of this lag in the development of global policy making institutions for the people of the U.S. and other nations are enormous.

National employment and income growth efforts are often ineffectual or only effective for a short time because of the ongoing policy push and shove of nations competing for advantage in the world economy.  What one nation does to improve its position in the world economy and grow jobs and incomes, other nations work quickly to undo.

For the world economy as a whole, this push and shove of nation-centered economic policy making produces a high level of economic instability and a high level of policy incoherence.

One glaring and maddening consequence of this combination of reduced national policy effectiveness and global policy incoherence is that the recovery from the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has proceeded in fits and starts and seems too frequently to be on the verge of collapsing back into crisis.  Global job and income growth is being held back and governments are being denied the tax revenues they need to protect economically vulnerable people from the ravages of poverty.

Most U.S. economists and policy makers continue to hold out hope for a much more robust economic recovery than we have had.  But, one has to wonder whether a more robust recovery is possible while the world’s economic house is so geopolitically divided.

See my related comments in:  The World Economy’s Demolition Derby of Competing and Overlapping Economic Policy Making Entities, January 22, 2012

IMF: World’s Economic Recover Stalls at End of 2011; Global Policy Coordination Needed (Addendum to January 22, 2012 Post)

ITEMS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Note: WEO refers to the IMF's World Economic Outlook report.

“For the United States, the growth impact of such spillovers is broadly offset by stronger underlying domestic demand dynamics in 2012. Nonetheless, activity slows from the pace reached during the second half of 2011, as higher risk aversion tightens financial conditions and fiscal policy turns more contractionary.

…

Importantly, not all countries should adjust in the same way, to the same extent, or at the same time, lest their efforts become self-defeating. Countries with relatively strong fiscal and external positions, for example, should not adjust to the same extent as countries lacking those strengths or facing market pressures. Through mutually consistent actions, policymakers can help anchor expectations and reestablish confidence.”

World Economic Outlook Update: Global Recovery Stalls, Downside Risks Intensify, International Monetary fund, January 2012.

COMMENTS

Most economists say (and the record of job growth during 2011 shows) that the U.S. must have GDP growth over 3 percent for a long period of time to substantially reduce the unemployment rate and bring discouraged workers back into the labor force (which will raise incomes).  Surely,  the U.S.  will not achieve the needed level of employment growth without working closely with other nations to implement a coordinated global policy approach to fixing the world economy and increasing global demand for workers.

Click this link to see related items and more comments on this topic:

The World Economy’s Demolition Derby of Competing and Overlapping Economic Policy Making Entities, January 22, 2012

The World Economy’s Demolition Derby of Competing and Overlapping Economic Policy Making Entities

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING ITEMS

“Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. …Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. ‘Those jobs aren’t coming back,’ he said, according to another dinner guest. … ‘We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,’ a current Apple executive said. ‘We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'”

Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, New York Times, January 21, 2012.

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“… we demonstrate that an individual country’s role in crisis spreading is not only dependent on its gross macroeconomic capacities, but also on its local and global connectivity profile in the context of the world economic network. … These results suggest that there can be a potential hidden cost in the ongoing globalization movement towards establishing less-constrained, trans-regional economic links between countries, by increasing the vulnerability of global economic system to extreme crises.”

Kyu-Min Lee, Jae-Suk Yang, Gunn Kim, Jaesung Lee, Kwang-Il Goh, In-mook Kim, Impact of the topology of global macroeconomic network on the spreading of economic crises, version 2, arXiv.org, April 2011.

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“Open feedback mechanisms ensure a supply chain’s ability to respond to a changing environment, but, in the case of financial supply chains, feedback mechanisms can amplify shocks until the whole system blows up. The Lehman Brothers collapse triggered just such an explosion … Since a complex network comprises linkages between many sub-networks, individual inefficiencies or weaknesses can have an impact on the viability of the whole.”

Andrew Sheng, Global Finance’s Supply-Chain Revolution, Project Syndicate, January 5, 2012.

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“Asian economies are exposed to China. Latin America is exposed to lower commodity prices (as both China and the advanced economies slow). Central and Eastern Europe are exposed to the eurozone. And turmoil in the Middle East is causing serious economic risks – both there and elsewhere …The US … faces considerable downside risks from the eurozone crisis.”

Nouriel Roubini, Fragile and Unbalanced in 2012, Project Syndicate, December 15, 2011.

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“Undoubtedly politicians should do a much better job of explaining to their constituents’ that what happens beyond the borders of their country-or city has implications for what happens inside their homes. … Despite all these problems, we have no choice: we must make local politics more attuned to global imperatives and make global finance more responsive to local needs.

Moisés Naím, The Dangerous Cocktail of Global Money and Local Politics, Financial Times, November 18, 2011, published on Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.

COMMENTS

On paper it all sounds good: in a system of global free markets, nations, provinces, states, cities and corporations pit their resources and their people’s skills and smarts against each other. As unfettered competition sorts out comparative strengths and weaknesses, each competing economic unit finds its proper role in the world economy, makes its economic contribution efficiently, and earns its share of global wealth.  And the winner is … everybody!

The reality is a global demolition derby of competing and overlapping national, transnational, sub-national, and corporate economic policy making that routinely litters the planet with the wreckage of businesses, communities, families and even whole nations.

Many of us get our images of global competition from the world of sports, but those images are disastrously mistaken.  In the sports world participation is voluntary and competition is highly choreographed.  The umbrella of rules under which teams and individual athletes face each other is comprehensive and well enforced.  The wholeness of the game dominates the individual interests and actions of the competing teams and their players.  As a result, certain teams and players seldom become permanent victors and the consequences of losing are relatively benign.

Teams and players do not bring their own rules to the field of competition; teams and athletes with big differences in competitive resources are not pitted against each other (heavyweight fighters are not pitted against welterweight fighters and minor league baseball teams are not pitted against major league teams); the ratio of referees to players is very high and referees have the power to ensure that the choreographed competition designed into the game is not destroyed by rule breakers; all players get paid whether they win or lose; competitive encounters don’t leave losing teams and players permanently broken and maimed.

This is not the case for competition in the world economy.  Participation is not voluntary and competition is chaotic and brutal.  A comprehensive umbrella of rules does not exist and the rules that do exist are not well enforced.  Global social and economic goals cannot dominate the interests and actions of the thousands of governmental and private sector competitors.  Certain competitors win and maintain dominance over all others for many decades; other competitors become chronic losers.  The consequences of losing are often devastating and extremely long-term.

Competitors do bring their own rules to the global fields of competition.  The more powerful governments and corporations create rules to serve their own interests, regardless of consequences for the good of the whole or consequences for the losers, and then impose them on the less powerful governments and corporations.  Referees in the world economy are vastly outnumbered by competitors and they don’t have sufficient powers of enforcement to reign in rogue competitors.

For almost all the world’s peoples who count themselves as winners, or at least survivors, a consequence of this global demolition derby is chronic and frightening employment and income insecurity.   For losing nations and communities the consequences are often profoundly devastating: high levels of infrastructure loss, permanently broken social institutions, widespread and chronic unemployment and impoverishment, and enormous losses of life to famines, wars, preventable disasters and curable diseases.

Almost certainly, the world’s people will be much better off if we actually do make global economic competition much more like competition in sports.

What Happens In Vegas Doesn’t Stay In Vegas: National Policies Have Global Consequences

“Thus, national policies affecting capital flows can transmit multilaterally. This transmission has not been fully appreciated by national policymakers. Further, they may not have incentives to take full account of the cross-border effects of their policies. Looking ahead, the upward trend in the volume of capital flows can be expected to continue, making it ever more important to address the associated cross-border risks.”

The Multilateral Aspects of Policies Affecting Capital Flows, International Monetary Fund, October 13, 2011.

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“These two-way capital flows created a complex web among markets and institutions, some regulated and some not. Against this background, case studies were prepared for European banks and U.S. money market mutual funds (MMMFs) and for German banks and U.S. mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). Another important case is that of the near failure of the American International Group (AIG), which turned out to have complex and systemically cross-border linkages with other global institutions and markets.”

The Multilateral Aspects of Policies Affecting Capital Flows – Background Paper, International Monetary Fund, October 24, 2011.

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“Why might we expect a rise in U.S. bond yields to raise bond yields in other countries? First, openness of financial markets and arbitrage opportunities may mean that interest rate shocks are transmitted across economies. Second, a closer real integration of two economies may imply that a monetary policy shock or an inflationary shock in one economy may lead investors to expect similar developments in another, thus inducing a significant transmission of shocks in bond markets and money markets.”

Vivian Z. Yue and Leslie Shen, International Spillovers on Government Bond Yields: Are We All in the Same Boat?, August 01, 2011, Blog at website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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“The trend toward greater diffusion of authority and power occurring for a couple decades is likely to accelerate because of the emergence of new global players, increasingly ineffective institutions, growth in regional blocs, advanced communications technologies, and enhanced strength of nonstate actors and networks.”

Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, National Intelligence Council, PDF version, November 2008.

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The words in the quotes above are dispassionate, but the realities to which they refer get in our faces every day.  The mix of global economic processes and competitive and uncoordinated national policy making creates a bubbling soup of chaotic change.  (Go-it-alone economic policy making by sub-national and regional governments surely contribute to this soup of chaotic change as well.)

This environment makes decision making and planning very difficult and prone to error for the majority of the world’s investors and business owners and managers. It destabilizes the global world of work and damages the families and communities that depend on that world.  And it confounds policy experts because it is not possible to find logic in the illogical.

Moreover, this environment plays into the hands of the bad actors in the world economy, who promote and thrive on the high volumes of misunderstandings and errors that now plague economic and policy decision making at every level of organization in the world economy.

For more on this topic see my post, Fragmented and Weakened Global Governance Perpetuates the World’s Employment Crisis, September 9, 2011. Also see the topic Economics and Economic Policy (under U.S. Economic Policy heading at right).