That's Interesting
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The Coast Guard Just Busted a Garlic-Smuggling Operation in the Caribbean
05th July, 2019Unlike other forms of smuggling that often involves illegal or banned substances, garlic is smuggled primarily for economic reasons.
“As part of the recent trade war between China and the United States, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese garlic of 10 percent.”
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NPR: Chubb Insurance no longer underwriting coal industry
05th July, 2019“Chubb insurance says it will no longer underwrite coal-fired power plants, the first major U.S. insurer to do so. It’s a big victory for a campaign that’s been pressuring the industry over climate change.”
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IMF Working Paper – Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide
30th May, 2019“The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interest rates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature; it is a policy choice. The central message of this paper is that with readily available tools a central bank can enable deep negative rates whenever needed—thus maintaining the power of monetary policy in the future to end recessions within a short time.”
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NPR Planet Money: The Problem With Banning Plastic Bags
30th May, 2019“For decades, plastic bags have been staples at grocery stores. They also clog drains, cause floods, litter landscapes and kill wildlife. Consequently, a growing number of cities and counties have passed laws that ban or tax plastic bags in the past ten years. But as our colleague Greg Rosalsky explored in a recent Planet Money newsletter, banning plastic bags may be worse for the environment.”
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Tariffs on China are no substitute for a trade deal
30th May, 2019Podcast Episode: “In a special episode of Dollar and Sense, Senior Fellow David Dollar provides an update on the state of U.S.-China trade talks following the latest round of negotiations in Washington this week.”
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NPR Planet Money Podcast: Will China Overtake The US?
30th May, 2019“It seems inevitable that eventually China will have a bigger overall economy than the United States.
George Magnus doesn’t agree. He’s an academic and the author of a book about China called Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy. And he says there are three reasons why China’s rise to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy is not inevitable.”
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Assessing Abenomics: Evidence from Inflation-Indexed Japanese Government Bonds
30th May, 2019Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paper assessing the impact of news concerning the reforms associated with “Abenomics” using an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields.
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