Official Money

What are the differences between a commodity money, credit money and the Ikon – currency of the future ? Using the gold standard as an example of the first, where the price of gold was fixed and money was convertible into it on demand at that price, gold and sure claims on gold were money….
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  Ever since the end of Bretton Woods, exchange rate volatility driven by diverse monetary policies and diverse expectations about future exchange rates have been frequent sources of shocks to the world economy and national economies. The very existence of independent central banks with independent monetary policies is the common origin of shocks. The more…
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  Nearly six years after the outbreak of the worst financial crisis in history, prospects for a full economic recovery remain elusive. Unemployment remains at very high levels, and standards of living for many people in developed countries are likely to fall over the first two decades of this century. Meanwhile, emerging markets remain vulnerable…
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This is a technical appendix to the G20 Communique announced in a separate press notice Rationale: A global currency standard will give the peoples of the world a common measure of value, linking past, present and future, and connecting peoples across space as well as time. The old complicated network of dozens of currencies is…
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Yesterday I kicked off a round-table discussion organised by the CSFI of Benn Steil’s new book which carries this title. This is what I said. Benn Steil starts this stimulating book by poking fun at those politicians and others who have, in recent years, called for “a new Bretton Woods”. They have all been disillusioned….
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The death of Margaret Thatcher reminds us all of the power of ideas, when allied to guts and leadership, to change the world. She identified one area of national life after another where restrictions and old ways of doing things were holding back innovation and the spirit of enterprise that lay dormant in the British…
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Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Graeber is fascinated by the past. Indeed, Graeber might have started his book (“Debt: the first 5,000 years”) with an echo of the famous opening of The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”. But perhaps he thought that would be presumptuous.   Graeber starts off…
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A few years ago, there was much excitement amongst monetary reformers when the governor of the People’s Bank of China made a speech championing reform. But China did not follow up that initiative – indeed, officials downplayed it, saying that Governor Zhou had been speaking in a personal capacity. Then came President Nikolas Sarkozy, who…
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As Jacob (“Jack”) Lew, the ex Citibank man who has succeeded Tim Geithner as US Treasury Secretary, surveys his inheritance, one thing he will probably not be worrying about is the dollar. Perhaps he should. True, prospects for the US currency have brightened recently. This reflects the new spring in the step of the American…
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The new generation of top central bankers – notably Mark Carney, Janet Yellen (prospectively), Haruhiko Kuroda, and Mario Draghi – need to lift their sights. Official policies to combat continued economic weakness rely on: Central banks using their balance sheets even more aggressively – and riskily – to provide monetary stimulus applying new layers of…
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