Philippe Legrain

The US and others seem to believe that China’s currency is the biggest obstacle to the global recovery. That is highly debatable, as I argued on VoxEU. In any case, the Chinese renminbi is up 3.1% against the dollar over the past 12 months. And since inflation is 4.4% in China and only 1.1% in […]

VoxEU, 2 November 2010. While the debate over global imbalances often focuses on China, this column argues that the biggest threat to the world economy comes from the other side of the seesaw – the US.

Check out my new article on VoxEU.org.

I debated the future of the euro with Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, on the Riz Khan show on Al Jazeera English on 20 May 2010.

“Fears grow about weaker euro” is the headline in today’s FT. But what’s to fear? For a start, the euro is hardly “weak”. It is back to where it was 18 months ago and is still much stronger than it was, for instance, in 2002, when it was worth less than 90 US cents. But […]

Interesting piece by Nayan Chanda

Ken Clarke and the Tories are trying to scare people by claiming that a hung parliament would cause a crisis in the markets that could push Britain into the hands of the IMF. Yet as Cleggmania has swept Britain this week, the pound has strengthened against the euro every day, as this graph from FT.com […]

Excellent article by Avinash Persaud on Vox Highlights: The notion that the world was suffering from a savings glut, that would have pulled us all into recession were it not for America’s selfless consumption, is also as deficient in arithmetic as it is self-serving. You cannot save yourself into boom… But all it would take […]

This is a more technical post. When financial panic spread even to sound emerging economies after Lehman collapsed in September 2008, the Fed responded by extending swap lines to central banks in Brazil, Korea, Mexico and Singapore, while the ECB provided them to Hungary and Poland. These unprecedented moves played a key role in quelling […]

Amid all the euro-phobes' schadenfreude about the euro-zone's travails, it is remarkable that the pound is plunging – not just against the US dollar, but also against the much-maligned euro.  If markets get panicky about the UK government's deficits, we may regret our not-so-splendid isolation from the euro-zone.