Economics is one subject which really fascinated me from term-1. Even the professors for Eco were damn good. Prof. Rakesh Vohra from Kellogg and Prof. Krishna Kumar from Duke are simply superb. They both have their own styles of teaching. As part of the course we have seen the commanding heights documentary. This is the best documentary I have ever seen.
Starting from Micro economics which took us from demand and supply relationship at firm level, industry level ended with Macro Economics which took us till speculative attacks in the economy. Previously I used to read some articles about economy. But apart from the article I read I couldn’t sense more than that like the theory behind that. Now these frameworks helped me a lot in understanding so many concepts. Global economics covered lot of topics like fiscal policy, monetary policy, foreign exchange, PPP, reserves, credibility regime, inflation , deflation, exchange fluctuations, budget deficits and surpluses, reasons for slow down in the economy, productivity shocks, currency appreciations, depreciations etc .
Here is an interesting video talk by prestowitz (president of economic strategy institute) about the impact of the return of India and china.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/358/
US may have to face some tough times if the growth in India and china continues in the same pace. According to few research papers US is heading towards bankruptcy. But Bush administration still says its budget deficit is just 2.3pc of GDP which is smaller than UK. And another threat to US is baby boomer generation is going to retire and the expenditure on health care goes up. They may have to balance the budget by increasing the taxes.
Here is another video (funny) which is done by columbia MBA students for their skit party. The person singing in the video is pretending to be Glenn Hubbard who was one of the leading candidates to be the Chair of the Federal Reserve, but the job was instead given to Ben Bernanke.
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/
PS: Entire 6 hour documentary of commanding heights can be viewed in the below link.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/story/index.html
QuickTime needs to be installed for this. All Episodes (full 6 hour video) is available online to be watched for free.
5 comments:
I like Microeconomics but don't have fun doing Macro. The macro exam for us is to analyze newspaper articles and define the tools and reasoning behind them. So, we need to comment on Japan's zero interest rate, to Bernake raising interest rates for the 17th time in the US to China under pressure for maintainig fixed exchange rate to Zimbabwe having a 1000% inflation rate. Reading the news paper articles in the exam is fun but analyzing them, drawing graphs to explain them...aargh,I find it tough.Thanks for link of Prestowitz..Itz interesting.
hahaha. Global economics is the last exam of term2 (i.e on coming tuesday). Even our global eco paper will be more or less the same. We may have to analyse the articles and represent the things in graphs. May be reading all the articles will be fun but not sure if the same goes with drawing graphs:-D
Hey Anu,
The US budget deficit is reducing now. Check out new article on it:
The budget
Shrinking deficit and soaring taxes
Jul 13th 2006
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7169526
You will need to go to this link through LRC as this one is a subscribed link!
Happy MacroEco! inflating fun! No Deficit in exams and growth in wisdom!
Hmmmm, So it is trying to build the credibility. But i guess it has to cut the medicare benfits too if required.
This is really interesting:
Others grumbled that much of the fiscal “improvement” was fake, arguing that the Bush team regularly overestimates deficits early in the year so that it can flourish better numbers later on.
The White House's February forecast of a $423 billion deficit was indeed far above other people's. Both the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and economists on Wall Street expected a gap of about $370 billion.
(Courtesy: THE ECONOMIST)
Thanks and same to you abhishek ;-)
Had I known that Commanding Heights was available on the Net, may be i would not have bought the video.
Commanding Heights touches on the right things - capitalism vs socialism, entreprenuership, and how these relate to personal freedom. Thanks to CH, I hope to lay my hands on The Road to Serfdom.
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