Finance

As we prepare to digest the implications of this week’s ECB move, it seems worthwhile to take a look at the monetary economics of fixed exchange rates.

[The following guest post is by John Whittaker, from whom we have learned much of what we know about how the European payments system works. See his terrific papers here and here, both of which reward close study. He has been looking over the last couple Money View posts, and the comments to those posts, and has this to say.]

Why is the IMF getting involved in the Eurocrisis, and why is its involvement taking the form of lending to individual member states of the Eurozone?

The ECB has always been the protagonist of the eurozone crisis story.

The fact of the matter is that European bank funding markets are collapsing onto the ECB balance sheet.

Bloomberg’s reporters continue their diligent work looking back on the Fed’s lending in the subprime crisis.

Europe is embarked on a grand experiment, managing modern financial crisis without a dealer of last resort, so refusing to follow the lead of the 2008 Fed.

A week ago, Mark Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board, warned of emerging global consequences of the escalating eurozone crisis.

My first TV chat show performance:

The crisis has exposed the failure of economic models to deal sensibly with endogenously generated crises propagating from the financial sectors to the real economy, and back again.

Okay, so here is the statement, but what does it mean? Felix Salmon offers an unnamed advisor’s flowchart. Let’s see if Money View thinking can do better.

Last week Goldman Sachs published a note in favor of the Fed’s adopting a formal nominal GDP target, while Fed-watchers caught a whiff of a possible change in policy in the works.

Plumbing Matters

Focus on quantities

First ECB, then EFSF