A North Atlantic trade and currency zone?
Preparing for a possible break-up of the EU
David Cameron’s speech threatening to pull the UK out of the EU unless the other members agree to its demands may have started a process of withdrawal that could become irreversible. Although this outcome would be contrary to the stated objectives of the UK prime minister and British government, commentators on both sides of the…
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Gordon Brown on stubborn national politics
The former UK prime minister is worth listening to
Gordon Brown is far from being my favourite politician. As economic Czar of Britain’s Labour government from 1997 to 2007 he started well – struggling hard and long to establish fiscal credibility – only to throw it all away. He then spent a miserable three years as prime minister to 2010 trying to contain the…
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Regulation at a dead end
Look at what Andy Haldane, Charles Calomiris, Bill Isaac and Richard Fisher are saying
Last week Charles Goodhart uttered what I called his cry of despair (See RP’s Diary 13/01/13); now it is BOE’s Andy Haldane’s turn. Goodhart has realised that we are running out of monetary policy models – rules or frameworks like inflation targeting (IT) by which central banks steer interest rate policies. He warns of…
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Is real reform within our grasp?
Yes if we learn from people with something relevant to say
Not many central bankers or regulators are willing or able to think deeply about the nature of money and the implications of the collapse of trust in banking. Two exceptions are Mervyn King and Peter Praet. This post is about them and other thinkers worth attending to. King’s views are well known and he…
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Memories of Professor James Buchanan
Farewell to an heroic intellect
I first came across James Buchanan through his long-term collaborator and colleague, Professor Gordon Tullock. It must have been in 1972 or 1973. Gordon and I met by accident in Frankfurt, where I was interviewing the then president of the Bundesbank for The Banker, of which I was then editor. We had one of those…
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Goodhart’s cry of despair
The doyen of monetary economists grasps what is at stake
Five years after the international banking system fell into the arms of the central banks and governments, there is still a paralysing uncertainty about the extent and cost of regulation, the viability of banking models and the monetary policy regime. More about financial regulation and banking models in future columns. Now let us look…
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The Money Trap: Escaping the Grip of Global Finance By Robert Pringle
A Review by Warren Coats
“Robert Pringle’s The Money Trap should be very high on the list of books for anyone wanting to understand the weaknesses and flaws in the existing approaches to national monetary and banking policies and the international arrangements that link them. “ Robert Pringle’s The Money Trap should be very high on the list of books…
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My New Year wishes
A revised version of the article I posted two days ago
The world economic recovery remains fragile and could easily be derailed by renewed financial turmoil. My first wish is a terminological one – please, can we find a more useful word or phrase to describe what has happened? The word “crisis” and the phrases “financial crisis” , “great financial crisis”, “Global Financial Crisis” ,…
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Why Asia fears new currency war
The world is preparing to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War I by starting another
The territory will be different – the sides will measure their gains and losses in terms of fractions of an exchange rate movement rather than yards of muddy land in Flanders. But the implications could be far-reaching. Nothing less than the future shape and health of the world economy is at stake. The…
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Please, don’t fall in love with NGDPLT
It will doom us to yet another boom-bust cycle of despair.
The Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England are said to be moving to adopt an acronym as the next love of their life – NGDPLT. The notion that monetary policy should aim to ensure steady growth in domestic output, measured in current prices, was first put forward during the…
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