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[Jean Pisani-Ferry] Central bankers keen to take on new responsibilitiesViewpointsMar 1, 2021Twenty years ago, central bankers were proudly narrow-minded and conservative. They made a virtue of caring more about inflation than about the average citizen, and took great pains to be obsessively repetitive. As future Bank of England Gov. Mervyn King said in 2000, their ambition was to be boring. The 2008 financial crisis abruptly dashed that objective. Ever since, central bankers have been busy developing new policy instruments to fight fires and ward off emerging threats. Nonetheless, ma
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[Shang-Jin Wei] Can US escape stimulus trap?ViewpointsMar 1, 2021As US President Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package works its way through Congress, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (a Democrat) and many Republicans argue that the plan is too big. But perhaps a more important question is whether the United States is falling into a “stimulus trap,” and, if so, how to get out of it. The Biden rescue plan is the federal government’s third attempt within a year to help the US economy recover from the pan
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[Digital Simplicity] Disclosure of odds of getting game items in disputeViewpointsFeb 27, 2021Playing a mobile game is supposed to be entertaining. But it’s no longer deemed a plaything. For instance, 0.00029 percent is the official chance that gamers, in theory, could get an extremely rare item in a popular Korean mobile game. Despite the slim chance, some hyper-rich gamers spend over $1 million in real money to get such items, translating into huge profit for developers and publishers. In recent months, game developers here are rushing to announce steep pay raises for their emp