Stephen S. Roach — America and China’s Codependency Trap

On August 14, President Donald Trump instructed the US Trade Representative to commence investigating Chinese infringement of intellectual property rights. Whatever the merit of such allegations, Chinese retaliation against US trade sanctions would almost certainly cause far more economic damage.

Project Syndicate
America and China’s Codependency Trap

Stephen S. Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, now a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management

Diane Coyle — Property is – theft?

Buying versus renting. Is buying over in the drive for rent-seeking?

The Enlightened Economist

Property is – theft?
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Diane Coyle — Capitalism and the law

Short review of The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law by Brett Christophers. 

I greatly admired his previous book, Banking Across Boundaries, and this new one has the same compelling combination of analysis and historical detail. The theme this time is capitalism as a constant balance between competitive markets and market power, these two forces applied by laws and their enforcement. Anti-trust laws are enacted or enforced with greater rigour when monopoly power gets out of hand. Intellectual property laws are strengthened after periods of cut-throat competition. In contrast to those – often Marxist – writers who have seen a single direction of travel toward ever-greater monopoly power, Christophers argues here that there is a cycle. He cites Kalecki, but also Marx’s dialectics: “Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly,” Christophers quotes Marx as writing in a letter of 1846.…

Christophers ends with Lenin’s prediction that the future is capitalist monopoly on the international stage, monopoly imperialism. I have more confidence in self-correcting mechanisms. We will see.

The Enlightened Economist
Capitalism and the law
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation