Thursday, October 25, 2007

Interesting National Bureau of Economic Research study of the Iraq "surge"

According to Michael Greenstone of the MIT Economics Department, in his new NBER working paper, "Is the 'Surge' Working? Some New Facts" (NBER Working Paper 13458, 10/07), while various on-the-ground Iraqi indicators are mixed, perhaps the most salient fact is that Iraq's bonds have declined by 40% since the surge started. He concludes:

"This decline signals a 40% increase in the market's expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that, to date, the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it."

Bond prices reflect, of course, people betting real money for real payoffs down the road, either good or bad. This market, unlike that for Washington punditry, is one in which it actually pays off to be right, rather than wrong.

3 comments:

Andrew said...

Wouldn't this be fairly consistent with the increasing possibility of the three-state solution, or a very weak federal government? Thus, a weakening central government (more likely to default) doesn't seem incompatible with a more stable Iraq- which seems, at least initially, to be the case considering the extreme declines in casualty totals since the surge began.

Daniel Shaviro said...

Could be. Except, you might think devolution would be likely to involve splitting up the debt, not renouncing it.

Also, I was short of time when I posted and haven't read the paper yet. Obviously, a standard empirical problem is whether the problem would have gotten even worse but for the surge. But I don't think its proponents would be happy with having merely lowered the increased expectation of default that would otherwise have occurred from (say) 70% to 40%.

Dim4ksan said...

研究过程将影响您的观点,让您有机会站出来,在全面理解当前主题的情况下作业代写。画一个提纲。通过对主要思想进行相应分类来组织思想。大纲将是您整个作业的框架,必要的部分是引言、正文和结论。写下来。一旦您的文章从最初的概述中清楚了您就可以写下您想进一步讨论的所有想法。利用您的研究轻松地将您的想法融入您的家庭作业中。编辑和校对。如果您对作业代写的最初的草稿感到满意,您会开始审阅和修改作业。通读每一段,检查是否有错误或困难的论点。此外,要校对您的作业,检查那些可能导致您失去高分的表面错误。