The finance-trade-growth nexus and lessons from the past

“Institutions have a first-order effect whereas policies only have a second-order effect” says Peter Boettke in reply to Ha-Joon Chang (pdf) and in defence of Douglass North.

Last week, USTR released the President's annual Trade Policy Agenda, and nobody paying attention would be surprised to see that the document spends a disproportionate amount of ink extolling the virtues of American exports (and USTR's efforts to expand them, of course).  But this year's report was somewhat surprising in one respect: it actually acknowledged the benefits of imports too - a message that has been, as I and others have often lamented, almost totally absent from previous Obama administration speeches and documents.

ByJosh Arnold:Citigroup (C) shares have bounced strongly from their year lows of $24 to trade at $47 recently. Since hitting their 52 week high of $47.92, shares are only off slightly to $47 as of this writing. With the company's new CEO, Michael Corbat, firmly in charge of the bank and legacy toxic asset issues being wound down slowly, are the shares fairly valued?

David Wessel: Olivier Blanchard’s Five Lessons for Economists From the Financial Crisis: Here are Mr. Blanchard¹s five lessons in his own words, lightly edited by The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel:

Authored by Michael Pettis, originally posted at China Financial Markets,

By James Kwak

Drew Keeling, 17 May 2011Mass international migration is inherently controversial. This column looks at how the US immigration policies before 1914 sought to manage mass migration across the North Atlantic. It suggests that, with migration today seemingly neither well-controlled nor well-managed, the managed laissez-faire approach of a century ago is regaining relevance.Full Article: Self-limited international migration: Insights from the pre-1914 North Atlantic