Public Policy

Higher borrowing costs are adding to fiscal pressures at a time of high debt, making credible consolidation more urgent, says the IMF

AI has made borrowing more expensive. Alex Dryden explains how bond markets are changing

Sami Mahroum warns that AI technology could flood public agnecies with more work than human decision-makers can realistically oversee

Barry Eichengreen warns that opacity prevails in the private debt markets that are funding the AI boom. Investors need to watch out because regulators are not making information easy to obtain

Katharina Pistor thinks the US Fed and the US Treasury have lost sight of their central, but not independent, role in financial markets

Kenneth Rogoff warns that fiddling with bond maturities won't save the US from the painful fiscal choices ahead

From the JPY intervention and the Fed hold to new US tariffs, recent US policy suggests the return of fiscal primacy. Regime change is accelerating, says David Skilling

Gene Frieda explains why any strategy for reducing global imbalances must account for China's exchange-rate management

Arvind Subramanian thinks Chinese exports have had a greater effect on the global economy than any other single factor

Stephen Roach laments that the Chinese government has paid little more than lip service to its greatest macroeconomic challenge

Alessio Terzi and Stefano Marcuzzi consider lessons from the three-century era when corporate monopolies operated beyond the reach of sovereign powers

Westpac's Luci Ellis explores how policy makers can or should deal with bracket creep. Are periodic 'tax cuts' the right way? Or should tax rates be indexed?

Shang-Jin Wei explains how last week's meeting between the Chinese and US presidents could improve the global outlook

Toby Walsh explains why the world’s banks are so worried about Anthropic’s latest AI model

Lenny Mendonca & Martin Neil Baily see looming worker displacement from the march if AI as a greater challenge that systemic financial concerns

Gene Frieda identifies the market signals that would imply a move from fear of inflation to fear of recession

Alex Wang and Angela Huyue Zhang warn that Anthropic's Mythos model will make every country more vulnerable to economic disruption

Neha Narula thinks more oversight is needed before stablecoin technology becomes critical financial infrastructure

Westpac is part of a growing group of analysts to revise their view of RBA policy: 25bp hikes in both March and May expected. Single hike still possible but not their base case

Antara Haldar praises Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for discarding the fiction of a rules-based international order

With inflation now higher than previously expected, the RBA raised the cash rate in February. The question then becomes, how much more is coming and when? Westpac's Luci Ellis says another cash rate increase will occur, in May

The economic signals are pointing to a combination of a strong labour market and higher inflation, the ingredients for the RBA to move against these forces quickly. Financial markets sense the change and have quickly moved their pricing assumptions

Barry Eichengreen explains why, after 20 years, major economies' external deficits and surpluses are again a focus of attention

NSW and Queensland are singled out as at risk of a credit rating downgrade as infrastructure projects and entitlement claims mount, while tax increases become politically much harder