Thought Leadership: Feb. 21, 2012 - SmartBrief

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Thought Leadership: Feb. 21, 2012

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Modern Money

A collection of thought-provoking commentaries and analysis from the past week …

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and others join the Harvard Business Review to discuss the biggest threat to U.S. competitiveness. Pandit: “Globalization is both a wonderful opportunity and a big threat. … One of the things I see is that there is a competition for jobs. Every country around the world is trying to figure out how to create more jobs for its own people. We’re going to have to figure out how to compete with that.”

And more from Paulson on CNBC as he compares and contrasts the economic crisis in Greece and Lehman Brothers Holdings’ bankruptcy: “The one thing that we should take away from Lehman Bros. is you don’t want a big, systemic institution to fail in a messy way, and you clearly don’t want that with a member state.”

Former central bank governors of Argentina and Mexico write from experience in The Economist on the reason Greece should remain part of the eurozone: “The proponents of a euro-zone exit for Greece grossly underestimate its devastating consequences. Argentina’s experience should deter rather than promote the thought of exit. Nevertheless, a real problem remains: how does Greece regain competitiveness?”

PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian lauds in the Financial Times the coupling of the Federal Reserve’s recent efforts at increased transparency and policy activism: “The bad news is that we will not know for a while whether the Fed’s unusual activism will work. However, when the time finally comes — and here is the good news — historians will have an unusual amount of information to understand the content in which innovations and important decisions were made.”

Swiss Ambassador to the U.S. Manuel Sager responds in The New York Times to criticism of his country’s handling of tax and privacy issues involving Americans: “The Swiss government remains firmly committed to a timely solution that respects the United States’ legitimate interest in taxing its citizens.”