Kenneth Rogoff News

China’s giant housing industry is lurching into a new crisis that threatens to be the country’s worst yet. Two years ago, the debt-laden developer China Evergrande Group spiraled into insolvency, bursting the country’s real-estate bubble and setting off a chain of developer defaults and business losses. The industry’s troubles have dragged down China’s economy.

Former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff discusses the state of the economy following the July CPI report.

Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, is Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics at Harvard University. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he discusses the record rise in military expenditure worldwide: Q. Recent reports find global defence spending now amounts to $2443 billion — which economic areas does this impact most? A. While military spending does spin off some technology, by and large, it is not good for growth or consumption because it’s destructive. The United States and Europe are facing pressures today because of Ukraine, the Middle East and potentially Taiwan — but the defence budgets of the West are tuned to a different era. We had a peace dividend after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — now, things are going into reverse. This raises the pressure on debt and inflation.

unemployment rate at 3.5%, essentially unchanged over the past year—and so-called core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, is nearly double the Fed’s 2% target. “All in all, they’re probably in the 90th percentile of outcomes they might have hoped for in that the economy is strong and inflation is declining," said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist who has participated in the symposium in previous years. Here’s what to watch: Why Jackson Hole Attracts the Spotlight Most of the conference hosted by the Kansas City Fed centers on the presentation of very technical academic papers—nirvana for the nerds in attendance but not the general public.

Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. He is co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2011) and author of The Curse of Cash (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. He is co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2011) and author of The Curse of Cash (Princeton University Press, 2016)