Crash Survival Zone

America’s auto titans are dismantling their global empires. But across the Pacific, it’s as if the global economic forces that have pummeled Detroit never struck. Chinese auto sales are up, and this year China is projected to displace Japan as the world’s largest car producer.

Now, the auto world is buzzing that China’s auto industry may [...]

A disaster of historic proportions is still unfolding in the US labour market, where the pace and depth of job losses already make this the worst recession in half a century.

The economy has lost more than half a million jobs in each of the past six months. Even if output soon bottoms out, unemployment is [...]

Outrage in Canada as U.S. Firms Sever Ties To Obey Stimulus Rules

Is this what the first trade war of the global economic crisis looks like?

Ordered by Congress to “buy American” when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of [...]

European economies contracted sharply in the first quarter of 2009 as activity stalled across the entire region after convulsions in the global financial system late last year, according to reports released Friday.
The winter period, in which Europe went through an even steeper fall than the United States, probably represented the worst point in the economic [...]

By Paul Krugman

I have seen the future, and it won’t work.

These should be hopeful times for environmentalists. Junk science no longer rules in Washington. President Obama has spoken forcefully about the need to take action on climate change; the people I talk to are increasingly optimistic that Congress will soon establish a cap-and-trade system that [...]

The global recession sapped demand for all kinds of commodities — like steel and grain — yet small burlap bags are still arriving by the planeload at Russia’s state-owned diamond company.

A worker examined a diamond at the Alrosa cutting and polishing center in Moscow, Russia.
Each day, the contents of the bags spill into the stainless [...]

By William Pesek
If the bubble that just burst didn’t work out for you, build a better one.

That looks like the rationale of Asia investors. Their optimism has driven the MSCI Asia Pacific Index up 38 percent from a five-year low on March 9. In recession-plagued Hong Kong alone, shares have gained 52 percent. Even Japanese [...]

By Brad DeLong

Let’s look beyond the current financial crisis for a moment. Let’s think not about the long run, but the foreseeable medium run in which we are, for the most part, still alive.

For the foreseeable future, China alone will, on net, be buying more than $300 billion a year in dollar-denominated assets. But that [...]

China is buying up increasing amounts of minerals in an attempt to circulate its currency and save itself from inflation linked to the dollar. Many experts are forecasting that in a short space of time Beijing will have established the Yuan currency as a global reserve currency, taking over from the US dollar. For the [...]

By Benjamin M. Friedman

By now there are few people who do not acknowledge that the major American financial institutions and the markets they dominate turn out to have served the country badly in recent years. The surface evidence of this failure is the enormous losses—more than $4 trillion on the latest estimate from the International [...]