Archive

In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.

FT Alphaville has picked up on my friend James Sweeney’s latest, and since James cites the latest writings by other friends Zoltan Pozsar, Manmohan Singh, as well as my own most recent, the piece reads like a discussant’s comments on a shadow banking symposium.

Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity

Last week the central banks of China and Australia announced the creation of a $31bn currency swap line

Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (or UK ‘finance minister’) gave his annual budget speech where UK fiscal policy is set for the coming years.

Entangling alliances or entangling leagues are nothing to the entanglements of cash owing—Keynes

In his notorious “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists’ inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts.

Discussion of the results of the ECB’s LTRO2 has revolved around the question of hoarding, specifically whether banks are using the newly-created reserves to fund new lending.

Fundamentally, the ECB is trying to keep the ongoing sovereign debt crisis from turning into a full-fledged bank credit crisis.

Judy Klein is Professor of Economics at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She is the author of Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis 1662-1938, (Cambridge 1997) and co-editor of The Age of Economic Measurement (Duke 2001), and co-author of The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (in preparation)

Perry and I extend our apologies for the unplanned hiatus. By way of breaking radio silence, it seems appropriate to check in on our two favorite banks.

I am writing from my notes. The event I want to report took place some two months ago, I have since been preoccupied, then occupied, and now increasingly overwhelmed.

A money view of SDRs

From a money view perspective, the central issue is settlement of TARGET balances between national central banks within the Eurozone, and the key is to understand TARGET balances as a kind of interbank correspondent balance.