Global Strategic Finance Initiative

Speaking this past week at the Ex-Im Bank, President Obama laid out his strategy for doubling American exports within five years, a goal he announced in his State of the Union Address. Naming it the National Export Initiative, he described the strategy as “an ambitious effort to marshal the full resources of the United States government behind American businesses that sell their goods and services abroad.” The Initiative calls for the creation of an Export Promotion Cabinet, made up of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor along with the United State

"Trade is the, if not the elephant in the room, certainly some animal as yet to be defined that's in the room," said Douglas Rediker. ...

"Had the world economy collapsed, and there was a reason to believe it could have, the leaders of this country and others may have been forced to take hugely dramatic steps," says Douglas Rediker, a former investment banker now running the New America Foundation's Global Strategic Finance Initiative. ... Original Article

"Any argument that Lehman's collapse served the positive purpose of letting the world financial system participants know there was a risk to be had, that message lasted 24 hours," said Doug Rediker, Director of New America Foundation's Global Strategic Finance Initiative and former Lehman Brothers investment banker. "We may now have the inverse message: There are banks that are too big to fail."... Original Article

This report traces the roots of the current financial crisis to a faulty U.S. macroeconomic paradigm. One flaw in this paradigm was the neo-liberal growth model adopted after 1980 that relied on debt and asset price inflation to drive demand. A second flaw was the model of U.S. engagement with the global economy that created a triple economic hemorrhage of spending on imports, manufacturing job losses, and off-shoring of investment. Deregulation and financial excess are important parts of the story, but they are not the ultimate cause of the crisis.

Despite its aim, the European Trading Scheme (ETS) for carbon is widely regarded as an inefficient market. The initial design of the scheme has caused trading reactions that do not follow the pricing patterns of other, more efficient commodities.

Within ETS, it isn’t carbon’s price volatility that makes its market seem uncharacteristic of other commodities markets; commodity markets are often characterized by volatility. Instead, it is the fact that carbon’s price drivers are not so easily pinpointed and, therefore, its volatility seems arbitrary.

"The dollar may very well see periods of strength in the weeks and months ahead," said Douglas Rediker, director of the Global Strategic Finance Initiative at the New America Foundation. "But in the long run, I think it is clear that it will lose some of its hegemonic status." Original article

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“There's a delicate balancing act that the administration is trying to navigate through,” says Doug Rediker, a former investment banker now at the New America Foundation. Businesses, including banks, naturally want to keep growing. ...