Archive

And heading where?

Updating Hawtrey for the Shadow Banking System

Economics and politics go hand in hand, we all know that.

Fed to the Rescue?

I interviewed Victor Shih, political scientist at Northwestern, at INET’s Bretton Woods conference earlier this year.

INET is all about thinking new things, and indeed academia is supposed to inspire great thoughts.

Grand Bargain at last?

As part of the tremendous promotion campaign for the 8th edition of his textbook Economics, Samuelson was devoted a feature in the New York Times (February 5, 1970, p. 41).

Paul Samuelson was notorious for many things, but also, like Marshall, for spending most of his academic life in the same institution.

Alchemy or Banking?

Two FT pieces by Tracy Alloway caught my eye this week: this article from Tuesday’s print edition, and this post on Alphaville today.

Two things seem to be taken for granted in the current debt-ceiling debate: 1. The parties will come to an agreement on the debt ceiling because 2. These United States have never defaulted and will not start now.

Mention the government and the market and all academic reflection and civilized discussion dissolves into heated monologues. Politicians are an extreme case.

A Monetary Rorschach Test

Last time, I looked at the Chinese property market. The last link in that chain of financial interlinkages is the People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank.

You would have thought that to be a “jazz economist” was a good thing. I first imagined a “cool cat” that would entrance the hearts and minds of the populace. Not so.

So, how hard is it to write the history of exceptional figures? Shall we buy film cameras?

The view from BIS

The organizers of Duke’s Summer Institute on the history of economics were so worried that students might be embarrassed to ask their supervisors for a letter of recommendation, or that the supervisors would say it’s a waste of time to study history, so they took a last minute decision to cancel the need for a letter of recommendation.

In his two-tome, 1400 page Dutch Leerboek der Staathuishoudkunde (Textbook of Economics), first published in 1884, Nicolaas Pierson (1839 - 1909) accuses the great Scotsman of being a communist – or at least of consciously clearing the way for the socialists with their ideal of a communist society.

The Political Economy of Debt

The financial and economic crises started by the fall of Lehman Borthers came as a big shock, a financial shock, an economic shock, a psychological shock, and a political shock among others.

Some time ago, my colleague and dear friend (nevertheless!) Loïc Charles wrote on the previous version of the Playground, a very nice and intriguing post on Samuelson’s introductory textbook, Economics, and TV Series.

Liquidity versus Solvency

New Thinking about Modigliani-Miller

The Chinese property market may finally be boiling over; there are certainly enough signs that the bubble is ready to burst.

A New Glass-Steagall?

We continue to learn about what the Fed did during the crisis.

As a matter of accounting, if the U.S. as a whole buys from the rest of the world more than it sells to the rest of the world, then it must, on net, also be borrowing from the rest of the world. Perry has previously put this into a money-view context.

Bailout, Default, or Plan C

Further Thoughts

Sense about Social Security

These days, one hears worries of impending inflation.

Currencies or Commodities?

Breaking the Silence

Last week, I spent a few days in the Dalton-Brand Research Room, at Duke University, skimming through the Samuelson papers.

Learning How to Swap

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) was one of the bigger (in dollar terms) emergency programs implemented by the Fed during the crisis of 2008.

Taking a quick break from my work in the Samuelson archives – so fascinating, believe me! – I can’t resist sharing the following, which I found in his correspondence files.

War Reparations, or Prosperity

I was just amused with two projects by Shaun Usher: to “gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos” in his blog Letters of Note, and to present interesting letterheads in his Letterheadyblog.

Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job forces us to fundamentally rethink the connections between economics and policy making.

And what was QE about anyway?

One INET project is to “reconnect the teaching of economics with the working of the actual economy,” which is to begin with a reform of the undergraduate curriculum.

In my last post I argued that if we want a Fed that is ready for the next crisis, we had better understand what happened to it during the last one.

The place invites poetry. By the way, all sessions can be viewed from the website – check out in particular the last session featuring Gillian Tett of the Financial Times moderating a discussion between Paul Volcker and George Soros

I was not in Bretton Woods this week. I followed the event through the videos posted on the INET website and the exhilarating and exhausting experience of Benjamin, Floris and Tiago.

I am writing a paper about an economist that was at the Treasury in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s.

There are a lot of universities represented here, but who are the most likely candidates for participation and who might one expect INET to be interested in?

The Bretton Woods conference has a protean character.Talk in the corridors asks “what is it?” Some in the press (lots of press here) believe that deals are being made, the attendance of heavy hitters leads some to believe that consultations and strategies are being outlined for world government (Summers, Stiglitz, Brown, and yesterday Volcker arrived to close the event).

We have been talking and video interviewing people at the conference, and we’ve narrowed down a small list of questions which we try to build on and have so far talked to Kenneth Rogoff, Brad DeLong, Ha-Joon Chang, Stephen Ziliak, Philippe Aghion, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Barry Eichengreen and tomorrow we start with James Galbraith.

For one and a half days we had Anglo-Saxons talking finance and financial crisis: Keynesian stimuli, surplus countries bashing, drawing China in, and bullying of the Euro area and in particular Germany’s role in it.

The Fed changed over the course of the global financial crisis.

(Way) Beyond Diamond-Dybvig

But not by him

The illusion of black swan-proofing

Capital Flows, Cross-border Banking, Shadow Banking, and the Dollar

From MIT to IMF

Or Does It?

A Money View

Exit Strategies and the New Normal

What kind of “Minsky Moment”?

Financial Globalization and the Nation State

The concept of bank capital

Who’s afraid of finance?

The future of government mortgage support

A money view of the commodity bubble

Speculation, stabilizing or destabilizing?

Saving the (International) Dollar

When the survival constraint bites

And the nomination for best Perp Walk goes to…

And the nominees for Best Documentary are…

It is all about promises to pay in the future.

Before the dollar there was the pound, and after the dollar there will be something else.

Today’s Financial Times article: Report to highlight alleged conflicts of interest in Goldman’s dealings (Jan 12, 2011), Goldman’s pieties insult our intelligence (Jan 13, 2011)

Paper presented at Bretton Woods Conference

GFC finance as war finance

Why is this a surprise?

Today’s Financial Times article: ECB: trick or Trichet (Dec 2)

Is raising required bank capital the answer?

What’s really going on with Europe’s bailout of the Irish Economy

The first thing to say about QE2 is that it is a very different operation from QE1.

Presented at the inaugural Conference at King’s College