Tag Archives: financial crisis

Governments’ failure to manage the global financial crisis is having profound political and geo-political consequences – all of them adverse. Fuelled by political desperation to boost demand, national monetary policies are becoming steadily more aggressive – not so much “beggar my neighbour” as “sauve qui peut”. Financial repression is ongoing. As we all know, once…
» Continue Reading

  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…
» Continue Reading

The most common response I have had to the proposals made in my book for a new banking system and global monetary reform is that they are too radical, too ambitious, and won’t happen. When I ask such critics (who are usually of a friendly disposition) what are they suggesting, they usually reply that slow…
» Continue Reading

  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…
» Continue Reading

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….
» Continue Reading

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…
» Continue Reading

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…
» Continue Reading

Am I the only person to feel that the howls of moral outrage, protests and scathing editorials that greeted the first plan to “solve” the Cyprus banking crisis were somewhat overdone?. I myself joined in the criticism of the proposal to tax all deposits, and recommended the example of Iceland – while pointing out that Cyprus…
» Continue Reading

    Ex ECB board member Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi has a piece in tomorrow’s FT where he says Ireland is the model that Cyprus should follow. Really? To be sure, Ireland has done well. But there is a better example – from outside the eurozone. It’s Iceland, not Ireland, that has pioneered the way for small…
» Continue Reading

Last Tuesday I went along to the Adam Smith Institute to listen to Brendan Brown launch his new book, “The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve”.   Brendan picked out three channels through which  central banks’ ultra-low interest rate polices can trigger asset price inflation (followed invariably by a crash):   Central bank pegging of…
» Continue Reading