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Macro
Money, trade, debt and the machinery of economies.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 28/10/2026
Who really gained from Papua New Guinea's food tax cut
When Papua New Guinea took the tax off rice, tinned fish and other staples, who ended up with the money? Chris Hoy, Kingtau Mambon and Bobby Kunda follow it through supermarket prices, online prices and a national phone survey. Read it to see why a tax cut can miss the households it is meant for. We picked it because the team asked experts to predict the result first, which is instructive. Hoy is a World Bank economist; Mambon and Kunda teach economics at the University of Papua New Guinea. The World Bank funded the work; we found no other stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Why housing reform keeps stalling, and a way round local opposition
Why do housing reforms passed by state or national governments so often stall once they reach the neighbourhood? David Foster and Joseph Warren look at the strategy of overriding local planning rules from above, the resistance it provokes, and the record of an approach tried elsewhere. Read it for a clear map of the politics of building homes, relevant well beyond the United States. We picked it as an argument both reformers and opponents must answer. It argues from the pro-building frame of Works in Progress. Foster and Warren teach political science at American universities; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Is the renminbi deeply undervalued? An estimate with its workings shown
How undervalued is China's currency? Brad Setser starts from the IMF's own method but declines to take China's reported current account surplus at face value, and sets out, line by line, why Setser thinks it is understated. Read it to see how balance of payments statistics are built, and where a surplus can go missing. We picked it because the estimate comes with its workings, so a sceptic can check each step. Setser is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has argued this case in public for years; we found no stake beyond that position.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Remittances or welfare: what actually reaches the Pacific's poorest households
Pacific debates on migration lean on national totals: remittances as a share of GDP, income per person. But which households actually receive the money, and how does it compare with what governments pay out? Emilia Tjernstrom goes to World Bank household survey data for five Pacific countries and sets them against more than ninety others. Read it to see what national averages hide, in a live debate between two Devpolicy contributors. We picked it for bringing distributional evidence to an argument usually fought with aggregates. Tjernstrom is a development economist at Macquarie Business School; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/10/2026
Chinese economists on AI, jobs and weak demand
Beijing is pushing AI into every industry while urging caution where jobs are at stake. What do China's own economists fear for employment, wages and demand, and can the state afford the remedies on offer? James Farquharson surveys the Chinese debate, from State Council guidance to economists' papers and social media. Read it for the AI and jobs question seen from inside China, which English-language coverage rarely reaches. We picked it for the range of its Chinese sources. Farquharson writes for Sinification, a non-profit newsletter on Chinese debates; the piece previews a paper with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. We found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Two credit card delinquency measures that tell different stories
One New York Fed measure of overdue credit card debt has climbed far enough to prompt talk of a return to Great Recession conditions, while another, tracking new delinquencies, has barely moved. Donghoon Lee and four colleagues use the bank's consumer credit panel to explain the gap. Read it to understand how a delinquency rate is built, and why a widely quoted figure can mislead. We picked it as a lesson in reading a statistic before quoting it. Lee and colleagues are New York Fed economists explaining their own institution's data; we found no other stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Britain's productivity slowdown, in long and comparative view
Is UK productivity growth really unusually weak, and if so, why? Sophie Piton and Fabrizio Cadamagnani set Britain against its G7 peers and its own history, and break the slowdown down by sector. Read it for a compact, chart-led account of where the lost growth went, and what recent American gains might mean for Britain. We picked it as a clear reference on a question behind every British budget and interest rate decision. Piton and Cadamagnani write on Bank Underground, the Bank of England staff blog, and the post reflects that institutional view; we found no stake.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/10/2026
Can a UN tax convention win the politics as well as the drafting?
Negotiations on a UN tax convention aim to give developing countries more say over how multinationals are taxed. The harder question is political: where will the new framework sit beside the OECD process, and who will back it? Kesaobaka Nancy Mopipi sets out the history, the tensions and the institutional choices still open. Read it for an African view of global tax rules that rarely reaches readers elsewhere. We picked it as our wildcard: a policy brief that argues openly for the UN track. Mopipi's brief is published by the South African Institute of International Affairs; we found no stake.
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★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 27/10/2026
How Fast Do Tariffs Pass Through into Consumer Prices?
Who actually pays for tariffs, and how quickly? Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise and David Weinstein of the New York Fed estimate how the 2025–26 tariffs have passed through to the prices Americans pay. Read it to understand the channels, including the indirect ones most debates miss. We picked it for original data from economists with access to the best figures. The authors are economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; we found no stake.
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★★★★★ Added 27/10/2026
De-reservification, Not De-dollarization
Is the world abandoning the dollar? Brad Setser and Alex Etra argue that the most-watched statistic on the question is looking in the wrong place. Read it to find out where foreign dollars have actually gone, and why that matters more than central bank reserves. We picked it for original data that overturns a common story. Setser is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Etra is a strategist at Vanda Research, a markets research firm; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Who Will Create the Jobs?
Why do many Brazilians feel poorer when the statistics say the economy is doing well? Amir Lebdioui looks at the kind of jobs being created, and at who is left behind. Read it to understand a gap between data and daily life that politics feeds on, in Brazil and beyond. We picked it for evidence that explains a national mood. Lebdioui writes for Phenomenal World, a left-leaning economics publication; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Brady’s Lessons
Could the plan that ended the 1980s debt crisis help poor countries today? Stephen Paduano reviews new research by IMF economists on the Brady Plan and asks whether it should be revived. Read it to understand how debt relief worked last time, and why today's conditions make the question urgent. We picked it for a timely history lesson with a policy point. Paduano writes for Phenomenal World, a left-leaning economics publication; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Africa’s unprecedented urbanization - against historic normalization
Is Africa's urbanisation just a replay of what Europe and Asia went through? Adam Tooze argues it is not, and explains why the scale and the conditions are new. Read it for a big-picture view of one of the century's great changes, with the numbers to anchor it. We picked it because it challenges a comfortable assumption. Tooze is an economic historian who writes the Chartbook newsletter; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Has the AI Boom Impacted the U.S. Current Account?
Why hasn't the AI boom widened America's trade deficit, when AI hardware is pouring in? Julian di Giovanni of the New York Fed answers with an accounting identity most commentary forgets. Read it to understand how a boom can reshuffle investment without growing it. We picked it as a short, clear explanation of a puzzle many have noticed. Di Giovanni works in economic research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
How China became rich
How did China become rich? Ben Southwood and Robin Rivaton argue that the West has the answer wrong, and that the real engine is not where most people look. Read it for a bold, well-argued alternative to the central-planning story, and for what it implies for Western policy. We picked it because it makes an argument opponents will have to answer. The authors write for Works in Progress, a magazine with a pro-growth outlook; we found no stake.
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★★★★☆ Added 27/10/2026
Narratives under the microscope: what MPC transcripts can tell us about policy thinking
What were Bank of England policymakers really thinking in the years around the Brexit vote? Three Bank researchers use language models to read the newly released committee transcripts and track each member's concerns. Read it for a new way to study central bank thinking, and what it reveals about why rates moved. We picked it for an original method applied to a primary source. Dragos Gorduza and colleagues work at the Bank of England, whose committee they study, a stake readers should weigh.
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★★★★★ Added 12/10/2026
Eurosclerosis or US Decline?
Picks apart the claims of European economic decline relative to the US, made by figures from Jamie Dimon to the Draghi report, arguing nominal exchange-rate comparisons and inconsistent price adjustments do most of the work in the pessimistic numbers. Accepts a moderate relative productivity slip but finds no evidence of a decisive loss of competitive position, and argues for far more care in how these cross-country comparisons get made.
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★★★★☆ Added 05/10/2026
Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?
Argues the case for autonomous trucks rests on a cost comparison that ignores breakdowns, trailer handling and insurance, and that even 5 per cent fleet adoption by 2035 looks optimistic once those costs are counted. The sharper point is regulatory: aviation’s safety record comes from a well-funded FAA, while trucking’s regulator has a fraction of the budget and inspectors, so automation is being layered onto an oversight gap rather than fixing one.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Chartbook 476: Walled-in wealth #2
Adam Tooze tracks how the composition of the world’s largest fortunes has diverged since 2012: American wealth increasingly concentrated in a handful of tech founders whose net worth rides public markets, against a Chinese billionaire class whose fortunes stay tied to state-linked industrial and property assets. Chart-heavy and historically grounded, though the framing leans toward reading the divergence as a symptom of unequal late-stage capitalism.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Brian Tse on How China Plans to Keep AI Safe
A Q&A with the head of Concordia AI on Beijing’s emerging AI safety architecture, including which international coordination channels China still sees as viable with Washington and which it has written off. Useful as a corrective to coverage that treats Chinese AI governance as an afterthought to the compute race.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Construction’s Data Center Gamble
Traces how construction firms and their subcontractors are absorbing the financing risk of the data centre building boom, taking on fixed-price contracts against uncertain future demand for the compute those buildings will house. Argues the industry’s own balance sheets, not just hyperscaler capital budgets, are where the AI infrastructure bet could unwind first.
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★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
A National Champion?
Examines a government’s push to engineer a domestic corporate champion in a strategic industry, and the fiscal and regulatory contortions required to keep that support compatible with trade rules the same government has signed onto. Names the trade-offs rather than treating industrial policy as costless.
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★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
The Real Significance of the Trump-Xi Summit
Reads Xi’s reception in Washington as more significant for the protocol and symbolism Beijing secured than for any substantive agreement reached, arguing Xi will treat the visit domestically as confirmation of peer-power status regardless of what was actually settled. The article’s own page repeatedly failed to load this run, so this summary leans on the publication’s own editorial description rather than the full text.
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★★★★★ Added 21/09/2026
Control Board Colonialism
Ten years after Washington installed an unelected board to restructure Puerto Rico’s US$72 billion debt, the board has closed 673 schools and cut university budgets while paying out more than US$1.5 billion to consultants and delivering over a billion dollars in profit to the hedge funds holding the debt. Traces the setup back to colonial-era tax and shipping law that manufactured the dependency in the first place, and argues the board’s eventual exit will not fix an architecture built to keep Puerto Rico’s finances answerable to Washington rather than to its own residents.
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★★★★☆ Added 21/09/2026
Xi’s Flying Visit to Delhi and the Quest for a ‘New Normal’ with India
Reads Xi’s brief stop in Delhi as the start of a long, uneven process rather than a reset, with the border dispute and the question of the Dalai Lama’s succession still unresolved beneath the diplomatic courtesies. A useful corrective to coverage treating the visit as a thaw, when normalisation here is better measured in years than in a single summit.
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★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
Private Leverage, Public Costs
Traces how hedge funds’ Treasury basis-trade leverage has grown large enough that its unwinding now regularly forces central bank intervention, effectively socialising the risk of a trade whose profits stay private. Uses repo market data to show the mechanism rather than asserting the danger.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Taiwan Plays its Chips Card
Argues Taipei is using its concentration of advanced chip manufacturing as explicit diplomatic leverage in trade and security talks with Washington, rather than treating it only as a vulnerability to be protected. Traces how that leverage shapes Taiwan’s approach to reshoring commitments made under US pressure.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Second Place Was Never Enough: China is Chasing AGI
Argues Beijing’s AI policy has shifted from a catch-up posture to an explicit AGI race, tracing the shift through state lab funding and recent leadership statements rather than model benchmark comparisons. Positions the change as a doctrine shift with implications for export-control strategy, not just an industry trend.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Disaster and Constraint
On how climate disaster financing in the Himalayan region is constrained by the same institutions meant to fund adaptation, arguing shrinking multilateral aid budgets are pushing the financing burden onto instruments never designed for it. Uses recent glacial flood events as the case study rather than the subject.
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★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Susan Shirk on China and the U.S.’s Common Problem: Their Leaders
Interview with the veteran China scholar arguing that both Washington and Beijing are now driven more by domestic leadership incentives than by a coherent strategic doctrine toward each other, which makes the relationship harder to predict than Cold War-style bipolar models suggest. Draws on her decades inside US China policy.
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★★★★☆ Added 07/09/2026
Two Paths for Rideshare Organizing
Weighs the traditional push to reclassify rideshare drivers as employees against newer sectoral-bargaining models that leave contractor status intact, arguing the latter can win faster gains but risks codifying pay below minimum wage. Uses the SEIU’s home-care organising as a cautionary comparison for what durable worker power actually requires.
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★★★★☆ Added 07/09/2026
The Familiar Hong Kong Addresses in America’s Iran Sanctions
Traces Hong Kong company addresses that recur across entities named in successive US sanctions actions against Iran, in the filings-based tracking style that is this outlet’s specialty. Paywalled beyond the published summary, so this description rests on the outlet’s own abstract rather than the full investigation; flagged accordingly.
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★★★☆☆ Added 07/09/2026
Zhu Rongji’s “Big Move”
Part of Wire China’s retrospective on Zhu Rongji, the reformist premier who centralised state power even as he opened China’s economy, following its career profile with a piece on one specific consequential decision. Paywalled beyond the published summary; flagged accordingly.
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★★★☆☆ Added 07/09/2026
Michael McFaul on Autocrats vs. Democrats
An interview built around the former US ambassador’s own book, which frames today’s disorder as a contest between an autocratic and a democratic bloc rather than a return to Cold War bipolarity. Worth reading as the view of someone who spent years inside the US–Russia relationship, with the obvious caveat that he is arguing for his own framework.
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★★★☆☆ Added 07/09/2026
China’s Appeal to Central Asia is Growing at Russia’s Expense
Argues China’s economic and infrastructure ties to Central Asian states have deepened enough to displace Russia as the region’s primary external partner, continuing a shift tracked since the war in Ukraine strained Moscow’s capacity to compete there. Paywalled beyond the published summary; flagged accordingly.
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★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
Governing the Grid
Argues that decades of US electricity deregulation have left the grid unable to absorb data-centre demand without pushing the cost onto residential ratepayers, and proposes a federally backed National Power Authority, modelled on Depression-era agencies, to plan and finance transmission directly. A house-frame piece, left and state-capacity oriented, but the underlying diagnosis of deregulation’s limits stands on its own.
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★★★★☆ Added 31/08/2026
American transit is bad because of scope creep
Argues that US transit agencies have accumulated so many secondary mandates, environmental, social equity, local job creation, community consultation, that funding and attention are diverted from the core job of moving people, and that the low-income riders who depend on transit lose out most. A clean mechanism for a familiar complaint, told through what agencies are actually required to optimise for.
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★★★★☆ Added 31/08/2026
Chartbook 471: Still Safe? Cognitive dissonance in the Treasury market
Argues that US bond investors have already repriced Treasurys as a risky asset while the Fed and Treasury still treat them as the safe benchmark, and that this gap lets policymakers dismiss yield spikes as plumbing problems rather than warnings. A mechanism for why the usual signal for unsustainable deficits may not arrive on time.
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★★★★☆ Added 31/08/2026
Against the Lewis Model
Argues that Arthur Lewis’s classic prediction, that capital accumulation would eventually turn labour-abundant developing economies into labour-scarce ones with rising wages, has not held up, and that Marx’s account of capitalism continuously reproducing a surplus of labour through mechanisation fits the persistent wage stagnation seen in both rich and developing economies better. Worth having whether or not the reader is a Marxist, because the empirical claim, that labour scarcity keeps failing to arrive, is doing the real work.
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★★★★★ Added 29/08/2026
Nvidia’s China Partners and the PLA
Cross-references Nvidia’s own partner directory against Chinese government procurement records and finds roughly two dozen listed partners have won contracts supplying Entity List or PLA-affiliated organisations since 2022, including a deal worth over a billion yuan to a China Development Bank unit. Document-and-filing work rather than argument about export-control intent, which is what almost everything else written on this subject is missing.
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46 picks · page 1 of 2
How we rate
How the stars work
★★★★★ Original reporting or data, explains a mechanism, argues fairly.
★★★★ Excellent, one soft spot: a frame, narrow scope, or an interview.
★★★ Solid, if the subject already interests you.
Rated on the piece, never its politics. A frame tag, in italics, names the position a piece argues from so you can weigh it before you read.