Tag Archives: central banking
The Fed at 100
The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by President Wilson on December 23 1913. Its purposes were “To provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”…
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Is real reform within our grasp?
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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Goodhart’s cry of despair
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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Please, don’t fall in love with NGDPLT
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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What Osborne should have said
George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made an autumn statement in the House of Commons yesterday. This is what he should have said. Mr Speaker, Honourable Members, Successive governments have allowed the problems related to and in part caused by the operations of banks in this country to drag on. No solution is in…
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The New Bank of England
A well-informed correspondent, who did not want to be identified, predicts a full “spring clean”: “ I’m inclined to think Carney’s denial of interest (in becoming Governor) was genuine rather than a negotiation tactic like Napoleon’s thrice refusal of the title of emperor. However the denial of interest may have been based on…
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Carney’s likely priorities
Understanding markets and power leads to one conclusion Those who are familiar with his thinking report that he will be keen to emphasise that responsibility for managing risks lies with the firms themselves. So he will be big on reforming governance of financial institutions. He will insist that bank boards live up to their duty…
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Some nuanced views of Mr Carney
The UK media have been gushing in their welcome. It is right to welcome central banking’s “rock star”. But not everybody has been carried away by the euphoria…you only have to scan the Canadian press today: Andrew Coyne at the Montreal Gazette That our banking system was not so badly mauled by the crisis as…
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“Oh, what a lovely slump!”
Older readers of this column may remember a British film of the late 1960s called “Oh, What a Lovely War”, a skit on the first world war, using popular songs of the time, starring the likes of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith (her of the TV series “Downton Abbey” )….
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It’s the system, stupid!
One very senior former policy-maker has written to express his broad agreement with the analysis in The Money Trap. He cites three sentences on page 33, which sum up my review of the performance of the world economy since the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s: “The severity of the financial crisis…
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