DataPoints

John Cassidy, writing in this week's New Yorker, rethinks the financial bailout:

More specifically, Cassidy notes that the Obama administration now looks smart for resisting calls to nationalize the nation's largest banks:

Many financial experts who aren’t aligned with either party now believe that Geithner was right. “The people who were against nationalization have been vindicated: such a policy was not necessary,” Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a leading economics consultancy, said. Mark Zandi agreed. “Of all the various policy efforts to stabilize the financial system, none has worked better than the bank stress tests,” he said. (During the 2008 election, Zandi advised John McCain, but he regards himself as an independent.) Together with the original decision to inject public money into the banks, he said, the tests “put an end to the panic and stabilized the system. Geithner got it about right. Nationalization would have caused havoc.”

Back story, meta-narrative, secular trend: whatever term your discipline favors, the idea is the same. It's all about the larger context in which we frame current events. A helpful convention, but one that can lead to stereotypes and inside-the-box thinking. So I personally cherish those moments when the context changes, or some piece of news threatens to change the narrative. News like this (from last Friday's New York Times):

Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage...unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses. Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months...

Some manufacturers, already weeks behind schedule because they can’t find enough workers, are closing down production lines and considering raising prices...

The immediate cause of the shortage is that millions of migrant workers who traveled home for the long lunar New Year earlier this month are not returning to the coast... China has drained its once vast reserves of unemployed workers in rural areas and is running out of fresh laborers for its factories.

And then there's this, (from the National Bureau of Economic Research):

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong... We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic.

A friend of Generation-X years believes with some passion that most of the troubles facing her cohort can be laid the feet of the Baby Boomers. Soaring debt, stagnant employment, endless Woodstock and Beatles reunions—you get the idea.

Well she, as well as all the other Gen-X, Gen-Y and Millennials coming up, could have the last laugh. Or so it occurred to me after reading this blog post, containing the arresting one-liner:

“Inflation is the young’s revenge on their elders for over-spending."

Think about it. And remember, if you're old enough, who complained loudest about the miseries brought on by high inflation in the 1970s. Hint: It wasn't us baby boomers, then in our teens & 20s. Old folks, with fixed-income pensions and 3% yields on their insurance annuities, were the ones then taking the brunt.

'Nuff said.

From Sydney, Matt Circosta talks with CNBC about the forecast for the important Southeast Asian economy.

Meanwhile, Matt Robinson tells Bloomberg what's up Down Under:

Nik Bhattacharyya discussed Japan's liquidity trap for Dismal Asia/Pacific readers earlier this month. Later, CNBC asked him to tell the wider world..

Matt Robinson talks with India's NDTV about how one small nation's debt problems became a global obsession.