History

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?

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.

At a time when China is the favored investment destination in the global market, it seems unlikely that it would ever face capital flight.

This is a small paper on a big subject: the polarization of American politics since the mid-1970s. In its early stages this process bore more than a passing resemblance to the opening scenes of a Grade B disaster movie: With almost everyone’s attention focused elsewhere, a series of tiny, seemingly insignificant departures from long standing routines took place.

The theme of this session is very timely and controversial, on the ability of sovereign governments to supervise Large Complex Financial Institutions (LCFIs), now officially described as G-SIFIs, global systemically important financial institutions.

After the inception and, hopefully, the passing of the most dangerous phase of the international financial crisis, economists have returned to the long favoured subject of global imbalances.

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.