Articles

Finance is built on trust. It is based on promises about tomorrow, often paper promises backed by nothing other than words on a page. When trust in those promises breaks down, so too does the financial system. That is the lesson of thousands of years of history.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

With the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, a crisis in part driven by derivatives on subprime mortgages, a seemingly obscure sector of the financial market help fuel the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

what have we learned from the crisis and what should we have learned?

Can China lead the way on innovation?

The global financial cycle has transformed the well-known trilemma into a ‘dilemma’. Independent monetary policies are possible if and only if the capital account is managed directly or indirectly. This column argues the right policies to deal with the ‘dilemma’ should aim at curbing excessive leverage and credit growth. A combination of macroprudential policies guided by aggressive stress‐testing and tougher leverage ratios are needed. Some capital controls may also be useful.

Recent austerity policies have been guided by ideology rather than research. This column discusses research that reconciles disparate estimates of fiscal multipliers in the literature. It finds that common identification assumptions are problematic. Matching methods based on propensity scores show how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential.

Axiomatic bargaining is presented in MWG in the context of welfare economics (Ch. 22), the aim being the formulation of reasonable criteria for dividing gains resulting from cooperative endeavors (the “joint surplus”). It is further presented as an application of cooperative game theory, in which an arbitrator distributes the joint surplus in a manner that reflects “fairly” the bargaining strength of the different agents (although we could conceive of a situation where the parties are bargaining without an external party). If bargaining fails, the outcome is the parties’ own fallback positions (the threat point, or status quo).