Comment, analysis and other offerings from Monday’s FT,
Clive Crook: Medicare for all may be the best cure for the US
For the past few months, Barack Obama and his allies in Congress have been striding towards far-reaching reform of the US healthcare system without the public paying much attention. This is all changing.
Wolfgang Munchau: Optimism is not enough for a global recovery
The March signs of revival turned out to be little more than a technical inventory correction, with no change in the underlying trend. The world economy is still contracting, though perhaps not quite as fast as at the start of the year.
Washington cannot call all the shots
Michael Hudson, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri writes: As keen observers of America, if not effective managers of their own economies, the BRIC countries argue that the root of the global financial crisis is that the US makes too little and spends too much.
Editorial comment: Last chance saloon
How soon will the financial sector be back to business as usual? How soon thereafter will it be before another – perhaps even worse – crisis comes as a surprise to the industry, regulators and the world? The answers to these questions may be “much too soon”.
Lex on SWFs and big pharma
Sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East have invested in carmakers, oil companies, farmland and, more disastrously, western banks. Yet one potentially appealing sector has been left out of their buying spree: pharmaceuticals.
Letters: Latvia will not benefit from devaluing the lat
Anders Åslund, Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics, writes: Latvia neither needs nor would benefit from a devaluation. “Few countries are more different, as I noticed last week in Riga. Their only similarities are a pegged exchange rate and currency crisis”.
Maverecon: The magical world of credit default swaps once again
Willem Buiter writes: “To think I believed I had seen it all as regards creative uses and abuses of credit default swaps (CDS). But then came Amherst Holdings.”