A roundup of economic news from around the Web.

• Recovery?: Paul Samuelson writes that no one knows when a recovery will materialize. “Today, Federal Reserve Gov. Ben Bernanke glimpses a possible recovery by year’s end. He is a cautious scholar, backed by the best forecasters in the world at the Federal Reserve Board. I would be a rash fool to quarrel with this official’s quasi-optimistic view that by year’s end some stability will occur. You and I should hope that there will indeed be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel ahead. But shift our vision now to the future. Even if the short run prospect for a 2009-2010 recovery turns out to be good, I must warn once again that the long-run outlook for the U.S. dollar is hazardous.”
• Regulatory Reform: In the Washington Post, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers outline the Obama administration’s goals for regulatory reform. “The discussion here presents only a brief preview of the administration’s forthcoming proposals. Some people will say that this is not the time to debate the future of financial regulation, that this debate should wait until the crisis is fully behind us. Such critics misunderstand the nature of the challenges we face. Like all financial crises, the current crisis is a crisis of confidence and trust. Reassuring the American people that our financial system will be better controlled is critical to our economic recovery. By restoring the public’s trust in our financial system, the administration’s reforms will allow the financial system to play its most important function: transforming the earnings and savings of workers into the loans that help families buy homes and cars, help parents send kids to college, and help entrepreneurs build their businesses. Now is the time to act.” Simon Johnson, writing for the Baseline Scenario, is unimpressed. “Overall, there are no surprises here. Brick by brick, we are building the foundation for the next financial crisis; by all indications, it will be more disruptive and a great deal more damaging than the crisis of 2008-09. But presumably by then the authors will be out of office.”
• Optimism Isn’t Enough: Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times writes that optimism won’t get the global economy out of the crisis. “As everybody expects the others to move first, nobody ends up moving. In the meantime, the problems grow worse. US house prices, which are down by a little over 30 per cent from their peak, still have some way to fall. Until the U.S. housing market hits rock bottom, perhaps sometime in 2010, there is no chance of a recovery in the securitization market, without which there may not be sufficient credit growth… The non-strategy of waiting until things get better is not working. The March signs of life reinforced complacency. Optimism will get us out of this crisis only if it is founded in reality. Last week showed us that this is not the case.”
• Onshorable Jobs: On voxeu, Richard Baldwin says that there are lots of jobs that could potentially be insourced by the U.S. “According to Alan Blinder, constant improvements in global communications will bring much more offshoring of ‘impersonal services’, with an estimated 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs potentially offshorable. This column warns against taking these numbers at face value and recalls that the U.S. is actually a net insourcer. With the advance of communication technologies, the U.S. should see lots more service jobs ‘offshored’ and lots more ‘onshored’”

Compiled by Phil Izzo