Finance

These days, one hears worries of impending inflation.

Currencies or Commodities?

Breaking the Silence

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.

An Interview with the Author of “The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort”

War Reparations, or Prosperity

And what was QE about anyway?

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.

In a classic book and subsequent articles, Obstfeld and Taylor (2004) have shown how the broad contours of international financial history over the past century and a half can be well understood by appealing to the famous economictrilemma which emerges from the standard Mundell-Fleming model many of us still teach our undergraduates.

The euro area’s sovereign debt crisis continues though significant steps have been taken to resolve it.

In preparing this paper I have decided not to embark upon the decades-old issue of optimal-currency areas and governance as such. I assume that one of my colleagues on the panel will do that. Instead I will present an historical case of over-indebtedness of parts of a common-currency area somewhat similar to the present challenge of Europe, or rather of the Euro area with its common currency.