Tag Archives: financial crisis

  The attributes of gold usually cited as making it useful as money are summed up by the World Gold Council as follows:   “Gold’s scarcity, the fact that it does not corrode or tarnish, its malleability and status across civilisations have made it eminently suitable as a form of money.”   There is more…
» Continue Reading

    In this week’s FT Money (25/26 January) , Merryn Somerset Webb, editor-in-chief, has some interesting remarks on banking. She points out that customers have new, and often better, ways to borrow than “via the traditional fleecing machines with their pricey real estate and unreliable IT systems”. There are new entrants to the market,…
» Continue Reading

    Given that he was at the heart of monetary policy making before, during and after the biggest monetary disaster of all time, Ben Bernanke should be mightily pleased with the reviews he has been getting as he leaves office as Fed chairman. All but a disgruntled minority give him full marks for leading…
» Continue Reading

Heard on the Street:   “With the economy picking up, Yellen may taper faster than you think. She may turn out to be a hawk in dove’s clothing”.     “No way.  Janet’s a dove – a dove dressed in dove’s clothing”. “You are both mistaken. She is an owl. But, as Hegel said, the owls…
» Continue Reading

At the conclusion of a recent star-studded IMF conference, chief economist Olivier Blanchard argued that we may need negative real interest rates for a long time. Here is the passage in full: “Now let me now turn to monetary policy, and touch on three issues: the implications of the liquidity trap, the provision of liquidity,…
» Continue Reading

To mark publication of the “bigger and better” 360-page paperback (at £16.99 from Amazon, with a new 38-page preface) this and the following  posts list the book’s main themes, by Chapter, each with an update. Seen from November 2013, how have recent developments changed the analysis and/or policy prescription? Currrent Economic Outlook Although the short…
» Continue Reading

The so-called international  monetary non-system has four serious weaknesses. They are as follows: first, the absence of incentives to governments to correct global payments imbalances; secondly, the system’s dependence on one national currency, the US dollar, to serve as the major international reserve currency; thirdly, a dysfunctional financial sector and, fourthly, the systemic liability to…
» Continue Reading

  Three major failures contributed to the global financial car crash • There was a failure of banking and bankers – imprudence and irresponsibility, tinged with instances of criminal behaviour, insider trading, mis-selling, deceit and fraud; • There was a failure of central bankers – they were seduced into assuming the self-stabilising properties of markets,…
» Continue Reading

Having listened to the three witches, and acted accordingly, only to be betrayed ‘in depest consequence’, our hero ‘Macbeth’ reaches his ascendancy, which marks the start of  his downfall. He has a moment of realisation… Have central banks also reached an epiphany?   Central banks have been instructed to keep their eyes not only on…
» Continue Reading

The risks and dangers for the global economy are like hidden reefs for a ship – invisible but deadly. It is quite possible, for example, that expansionary US monetary policy can cause an asset boom in China so large that its collapse would bring the Chinese economy down with it – and thus throw the…
» Continue Reading