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Irwin Stelzer
Irwin Stelzer: Is the worst behind us?
- T hat jump in share prices (even after Monday’s tiny dip): Start of a recovery from a market bottom, or a “dead cat bounce” typical of bear markets? That drop in oil prices: the end of successive increases, or a pause before we head to $200 oil?
Irwin Stelzer: Don’t expect better times too soon
- This is the summer of our discontent. Only 14 percent of us are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States, the lowest figure recorded by Gallup’s pollsters since they began asking that question almost 15 years ago.
Irwin Stelzer: Saudi fears of cheap dollars are fueling high gas prices
- Control our oil supply and you get a say in our monetary policy. Not necessarily a good thing, as the aftermath of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s trek to Saudi Arabia proves.
Irwin Stelzer: Business will never again be the same
- This too shall pass,” King Solomon’s advisers told him to engrave on a ring, and refer to it whenever he felt depressed. Or so the legend goes.
Irwin Stelzer: Economy still treading water
- It’s one thing when consumers grumble about inflation. It’s quite another when Ben Bernanke, chairman of our Federal Reserve Board, tells an audience in Massachusetts that “the latest round of increases in energy prices has added to the upside risks to inflation and inflation expectations,” and that the Fed “will strongly resist an erosion of longer-term inflation expectations.”
Irwin Stelzer: No quick energy fixes, despite officials’ promises
- Toss a barrel of $135 oil into the economy, and the ripples will swamp some of the boats trying to stay afloat in the current sea of economic troubles.
Irwin Stelzer: Economics trumps politics, except in U.S.
- In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these,” says Paul Harvey, a leading radio commentator. A “great transformation [is] taking place around the world ... a tectonic power shift ... the world is very different,” writes Fareed Zakaria in his “The Post-American World.”
Irwin Stelzer: So much confusion about the economy
- If you used part of the long weekend to figure out where the economy is headed, and ended up in a state of confusion, you are not alone.
Irwin Stelzer: Depends on the meaning of ‘it’
- Money men say it is over. The economists say it might only have begun. And the politicians are loving every minute of it. Perhaps it all depends on what the meaning of the word “it” is.
Irwin Stelzer: As predicted here, stimulus is surely working — maybe
- One team of ecomedics has done what it can. Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve Board monetary policy gurus dropped the Fed’s short-term interest rate another 0.25 percent last week, to 2 percent, and told its patient, the U.S. economy, not to look for still another shot in the arm.
Irwin Stelzer: Debunking myths about oil
- There are more misunderstandings about the oil market than perhaps any other. Everyone is blaming the current round of inflation on high oil prices. Wrong.
Irwin Stelzer: Say goodbye to age of bank deregulation
- “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!” That wail from a British comedy spoof of the last days of Julius Caesar now echoes in the private offices of most of the world’s key central bankers.
Irwin Stelzer: Fed has now become cashier of last resort
- The financial world changed last week, and no one noticed. No one, that is, except policy-makers in the Bush administration and Congress, and the free-wheeling investment bankers whose favorite pastime once was trumpeting the virtues of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism.