Tag Archives: International Monetary System
Gordon Brown on stubborn national politics
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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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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My New Year wishes
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 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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Good riddance to inflation targets
As predicted in The Money Trap, governments and central banks are preparing to ditch the inflation target regime of monetary policy. Hilariously if predictably, they are insisting that it has succeeded – but that it is time to move on. So long as they bury their heads in the sand like this, no…
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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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A five-point reform plan
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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Is global financial reform possible?
Paul Volcker, one of the few universally-esteemed central bankers of the 20th century, has summed up in a few words the messages of The Money Trap. Maybe I should have saved myself the trouble of writing the 340 page book. At least, that was my immediate thought on reading his article. A colleague called to…
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