Stephen S Roach

With the snapback for durables likely to be finished soon, even rapid vaccination is unlikely to shorten the tough time that lies ahead for the post-pandemic US economy.

This is the best of times and the worst of times. As financial markets celebrate the coming vaccine-led boom, the confluence of epidemiological and political aftershocks has pushed us back into a quagmire of heightened economic vulnerability.

American exceptionalism has long been the icing on the cake for the Teflon-like US dollar. Those days are gone.

NEW HAVEN – Pandemic time runs at warp speed. That’s true of the COVID-19 infection rate, as well as the unprecedented scientific efforts under way to find a vaccine. It is also true of transformational developments currently playing out in pandemic-affected economies. Just as a lockdown-induced rec...

NEW HAVEN – It didn’t have to end this way, but the die is now cast. After 48 years of painstaking progress, a major rupture of the US-China relationship is at hand. This is a tragic outcome for both sides – and for the world. From an unnecessary trade war to an increasingly desperate coronavirus wa...

NEW HAVEN – In an effort to get a handle on the economic and financial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first instinct is to search for precedents and remedies in earlier crises. Many have pointed to the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) as the most relevant example, especially in the aft...

NEW HAVEN – The world economy has clearly caught a cold. The outbreak of COVID-19 came at a particularly vulnerable point in the global business cycle. World output expanded by just 2.9 percent in 2019—the slowest pace since the 2008-09 global financial crisis and just 0.4 percentage points above th...

NEW HAVEN – With the benefit of full-year data, only now are we becoming aware of the danger the global economy narrowly avoided in 2019. According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest estimates, world GDP grew by just 2.9 percent last year—the weakest performance since the outright contracti...

NEW HAVEN – Predicting the next crisis—financial or economic—is a fool’s game. Yes, every crisis has its hero who correctly warned of what was about to come. And, by definition, the hero was ignored (hence the crisis). But the record of modern forecasting contains a note of caution: those who correc...

The political calculus of both China and the US is coming into closer alignment, with each looking for some face-saving truce