A five-point reform plan
An operational summary of the Ikon monetary standard
Joseph Potvin of The Opman Company has sent me an “operational summary of the Ikon monetary standard and unit of account”, which I am pleased to share with visitors to this website. Thank you, Joseph, for going through the book so carefully and distilling the reforms it proposes in Part 4 to the global…
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The governor stakes revisited
The worse the outlook, the more gloomy I get about George Osborne’s choice
I have mentioned the familiar names – Tucker, Vickers, Turner, Burns. Of these Paul Tucker has the deepest grasp of the issues the new governor will confront, and he is getting encouragingly more radical on bank reform – like everybody else. Even Lord Turner has been asking questions about the whole viability of fractional…
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Why gold is back
Investors are buying gold as governments have failed to get us out of the money trap.
In investment terms, we face a scenario that says neither bonds nor equities are likely to rise. The ‘uncertainty’ is greater than ever. And it is ‘uncertainty’ that drives people into gold, not relative values in paper currencies. We have to think that gold is the central thing around which everything else moves….
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Eurozone to lead world out of the money trap?
The eurozone as a policy laboratory
There is a long, long way to go. But confidence is gradually returning to the eurozone – confidence that at least a break-up of the eurozone will be avoided (thought his does not exclude the possibility that Greece may leave). The fall in spreads on Spanish and Italian bonds over German bunds is one…
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The Sun King and The Money Trap
The governor made mistakes but has also pressed for necessary reforms.
The knives are out for Sir Mervyn (“The Sun” ) King. Commentators who once stood in awe now rush to condemn him.This is not a pretty sight. It is also unfair to someone who, while not being the right man to manage the UK’s biggest financial crisis ever, has made important contributions to re-thinking…
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Is it to be a Burns-Vickers double-act?
Chancellor close to a decision
Recent suggestions that Lord (Terry) Burns may be appointed chairman of a revitalised Court (Board of Directors) with greater powers of surveillance than the present Court make a lot of sense. That means the choice of governor, who will serve one term of eight years, may be between Paul Tucker, deputy governor, and Sir John…
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Cato Journal review of The Money Trap
Review by Judy Shelton
This is indeed a red-letter day for RP’s Diary. A grand review of the book has been published in a prestigious US journal. It states that The Money Trap “provides a superb explanation of how we got into this mess” – and a way out and “what we need to understand in order to properly…
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Central banks remain stuck in the trap
The true lessons of the crisis have yet to be learnt
Mervyn King has mounted a defence of inflation targeting. Monetary policy, he claims, is part of the solution to the crisis, not part of the problem. This view was echoed by many official spokesmen at the recent IMF meeting in Tokyo. Christine Lagarde praised the central banks. There are quite minor…
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Book Notes: The Money Trap
A Review by Michael Taylor
First published in Central Banking, Vol XXIII, Number i, August 2012, page 86. Four insights in particular are worth mentioning: First, Pringle is right to draw attention to the frequency of financial instability in the post-Bretton Woods world. Since the early 1980s there has been an average of one such episode every three years. The relationship between these…
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New entry to Bank of England governor stakes
Former UK Treasury mandarins jostle for top job
My apologies to subscribers who – following my tip – have placed bets on Gus O’Donnell to be next Bank of England Governor (RP’s Diary 14/09/12). They might lose their money. How did I come to overlook the irresistible charms of (Lord) Terry Burns? Terry is a pukka economist who followed a respectable academic…
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