price stability

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pages: 276 words: 82,603

Birth of the Euro by Otmar Issing

accounting loophole / creative accounting, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, currency peg, currency risk, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, oil shock, open economy, price anchoring, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Y2K, yield curve

The ECB soon began to use the expression and to speak of its ‘two-pillar strategy’.62 It quickly became clear that we had been right on both counts: the ‘two pillars’ became a trademark, but also drew repeated criticism. The quantitative definition of price stability The EU Treaty states quite plainly that the ECB’s primary objective is to ensure price stability. The wording leaves open the question of when price stability is achieved in concrete terms and by what measure this is to be judged. Since price stability cannot be achieved at any given moment, it remains unclear over what horizon the ECB seeks to reach price stability. Particularly for a new currency, a crucial factor was what expectations economic agents would form concerning the stability of the future currency.

A central bank might create the wrong impression of attempting to explain away the actual level of inflation suffered by consumers. Such an impression would undermine confidence in the central bank. For these reasons, the ECB decided to define price stability in terms of the HICP. All the same, the ECB does utilise a whole range of other price indices to analyse developments in prices. 2. At first sight, defining price stability in terms of a suitable index looks straightforward: price stability is incompatible with either inflation or deflation and hence, given price stability, the rate of change in the index would be zero. Only then does money perfectly fulfil its role as unit of account and store of value.

We have, of course, had many discussions on that and my interpretation of this quote is that like me Mr Duisenberg was stressing the benefits of price stability for monetary policy. We have achieved price stability, which is reflected in the lowest interest rates we have seen for decades in Germany and the lowest ever since the Second World War in Italy and some other countries. This is the contribution of monetary policy; this is spurring on investment, this is especially fostering building because long-term rates matter the most and [low] long-term rates are only achieved if people, if savers, believe that price stability will continue in the future. This is the main issue; it is inflationary expectations and not just achieving a one-off situation.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Yet, with the rise of the emerging nations, it is no longer so clear that the single-minded pursuit of price stability is delivering the goods. If anything, in a world where price disturbances in the West are increasingly the result of economic developments in the emerging world, the pursuit of price stability has contributed to mounting economic instability. Policymakers – governments, central bankers – like to take credit for the achievement of low inflation. Their institutions are specifically designed to prioritize price stability above all else, often based on the premise that price stability can easily be encapsulated in a single inflation target.

The German and Swiss experiences show that if other countries allow inflation to run out of control or more generally do not have a commitment to sound money, even the very best performers find the achievement of price stability too difficult. Even if the ambition to achieve stable prices was there – a view some would debate – the ability was not. Monetary sovereignty doesn’t simply grow on trees. Theoretically, Germany and Switzerland might still have been able to achieve price stability had they allowed their currencies to appreciate sufficiently. What, however, counts as sufficient? To this day, central banks struggle with the competing claims of ‘internal’ price stability, as measured by consumer price inflation, and ‘external’ price stability, as measured by the exchange rate.

But if inflation moves away from the target by more than 1 percentage point … I shall expect you to send an open letter to me … setting out … the reasons why inflation has moved away from target … the policy action which you are taking to deal with it … [and] the period within which you expect inflation to return to the target.8 In other words, price stability is, like the UK prime minister, first among equals. Even for those central banks with more than one economic objective, price stability is typically the most important. The central bank’s job is thus to safeguard the value of the currency. Price stability matters because Adam Smith’s invisible hand works best free of distortions. But in both the American and British mandates, there is no explicit recognition that inflation is determined not just by domestic policies but also by developments elsewhere in the world, other than by reference to ‘shocks and disturbances’.


pages: 436 words: 114,278

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

These price busts set in motion a chain of events that by the early 1930s would result in the most aggressive system of supply regulation and cartelization ever seen—and usher in four decades of oil price stability the likes of which the world had never seen before or since. Texas and Oklahoma together accounted for 55 percent of all U.S. production in 1927.2 Their local economies became extremely dependent on healthy oil operations and state budgets relied on revenue from taxes on the industry. While wary of appearing to favor monopolies or interfering in the free market, state officials were just as anxious as drillers were about oil supply and price stability. Major discoveries in central Oklahoma in 1926, collectively named the Greater Seminole field, tipped oil prices into another super-bust cycle.

It depended on Saudi Arabia playing the swing producer role—which it abandoned spectacularly in 1985 and 1986, triggering a price collapse. Fortuitous supply cuts outside OPEC and stronger demand later in the decade enabled OPEC to enjoy relative price stability. The Gulf War further cemented Saudi Arabia’s primacy within OPEC. But the 1980s demonstrated that if the OPEC era was to achieve the goal of oil price stability producers and consumers craved, it would require either Saudi leadership or luck—or both. 8 OPEC MUDDLES THROUGH: 1991–2003 The first two decades of the OPEC Era were extraordinarily tumultuous and marked by price upheavals instead of stability.

–Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, April 21, 2016 CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Author’s Note INTRODUCTION: THE TEXAS PARADOX PART ONE: THE LONG STRUGGLE FOR STABILITY: 1859–1972 1. AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT: FROM CHAOS TO ORDER IN THE KEROSENE ERA (1859–1911) 2. NO ROCKEFELLER, NO PEACE: BOOM-BUST RETURNS 3. WHY ARE OIL PRICES PRONE TO BOOM-BUST CYCLES? 4. THE TEXAS ERA OF PRICE STABILITY: U.S. SUPPLY CONTROLS AND INTERNATIONAL CARTELIZATION (1934–1972) PART TWO: THE OPEC ERA: 1973–2008 5. THE BIRTH OF OPEC: 1960–1969 6. OPEC TAKES CONTROL FROM TEXAS AND THE SEVEN SISTERS: 1970–1980 7. OPEC’S RUDE AWAKENING: 1981–1990 8. OPEC MUDDLES THROUGH: 1991–2003 9. TWILIGHT: OPEC’S POWER TO PREVENT PRICE SPIKES EBBS AND VANISHES: 2004–2008 10.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Rather, it is that questions of purpose run deep in this field, placing a burden on elected legislators, especially if they seek to put policy beyond their own day-to-day reach (an issue we return to in chapter 11). Price Stability under Different Political Creeds Price stability, the traditional core purpose of central banking, is different. Although independent central banks are often seen as the embodiment of liberalism, or even neoliberalism, I want to argue that price stability can be seen as a legitimate goal for the state under both liberal and republican conceptions of politics and, subject to one qualification, under social democracy too. For liberals (progressive as well as conservative), the definition of price stability favored by former Fed chair Alan Greenspan seems to warrant its legitimacy: that it obtains when “economic agents no longer take account of the prospective change in the general price level in their economic decision-making.”44 That is almost the canonical liberal case for any measure or regime: that it helps to leave autonomous people (and businesses) free to pursue their private projects and well-being without interference (in this case from noise in the value of money).

For republicans, a means of embedding price stability should be attractive because it helps protect the people from the possibility of an arbitrary imposition of taxation through (unexpected) inflation. Republicans would want this to reflect the people’s wishes for stability as a collective good, rather than the outcome of a battle between competing interests. They would also desire an arrangement—an institution in the broad sense—that constrains the state from reneging on promises of price stability: insulation from domination by the state. On this view, price stability helps—is even necessary—to underpin the legitimacy of the state itself.

Lighthouses and national defense are canonical examples.14 Arguably, so is the macroeconomic stability that central banks exist to preserve, but in fact it is not quite so straightforward. As proves important in part IV, price stability—stability in the value of money—is a public good, but the stability of the financial system is slightly different. In both cases, no one can be excluded from the benefits; but, unlike price stability, financial-system stability is, in the jargon, rivalrous. Like common grazing ground, the resilience of the financial system can be “consumed,” leaving it depleted and, thus, reducing the flow of benefits over time.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

However, the most striking similarity in the two periods is that a positive chain of events began once evidence of price stability returned to the commodity markets. It is these price trends, evident from the headlines of the day, which provided the most accurate indicator that the bear market in equities was coming to an end. Price stability and the bear ‘Look, Bill, at that gorgeous black crepe. It’s only twelve dollars. Clothes are dirt cheap now.’ James T. Farrell, Judgement Day Signs of price stability, as in 1921, coincided with the bottom of the bear market in 1932. As in 1921, growing stability in selected commodity prices broadened to include more commodities and finally reached the wholesale price index.

As it had been deflation that was crushing corporate earnings, it is not surprising that the equity market responded so positively to the first evidence of price stability. The rise in demand and prices happened at different times for different goods and commodities. In 1949, as in 1921 and 1932, a return of general price stability coincided with the end of the bear market in equities. As in 1921 and 1932, spreading demand for and price stability of selected commodities augured well for general price stabilisation. In 1949, as in 1921 and 1932, low levels of inventory in the system suggested that any price rises might be sustainable.

We have seen that all four of our bear-market bottoms occurred during economic recession. We have also seen that a return of price stability, following a period of deflation, signals the bottom of the bear market in equities. In particular, stabilising commodity prices augur more general price stability ahead and signal the rebound in equity prices. Of all the commodities, the change in the trend of the price of copper has been a particularly accurate signal of better equity prices. In assessing whether price stability is sustainable, investors should look for low inventory levels, rising demand for products at lower prices, and whether producers have been selling below cost.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Keynes appeared to be suggesting that credit inflation, and not the inflation of consumer prices, was the true sign that interest rates were out of equilibrium – a position close to Hayek’s from which he soon reneged.fn13 ‘Better no credit control at all,’ proclaimed the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, ‘than one based on this treacherous and dangerous criterion [of price stability]!’66 Central bankers also came around to this view. In 1937, the Federal Reserve’s Objectives of Monetary Policy affirmed ‘the inadequacy of price stability as a guide to policy’. The Australian Monetary and Banking Commission concluded in the same year that ‘price fluctuations are little more than symptoms’ and that the monetary authorities should not attempt to regulate credit by reference to a selected price index.67 Most financial histories of the 1920s and its aftermath fail to mention contemporary criticisms of the Federal Reserve’s price stabilization policy and pass over the coup de whisky delivered to the US stock market after the Long Island meeting.

Former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, 2016 MONETARY STABILITY IN JAPAN IN THE 1980s The failure of Hayek’s interpretation of the 1920s’ boom and the aftermath to gain widespread acceptance explains why later generations of economists and policymakers returned so enthusiastically to the pursuit of price stability. Anna Schwartz, co-author of The Monetary History of the United States, proclaimed that ‘Monetary stability is a prerequisite of price stability, and price stability is a prerequisite of financial stability.’1 By 1995, when Schwartz wrote these words, it should have been clear from events then unfolding in Japan that something was desperately wrong with this dogma. Over the course of the twentieth century, Japan had experienced bouts of extreme monetary instability.

In 1927, Hayek was appointed the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, having previously studied monetary policy in New York. Hayek thought that the policy of price stabilization – as advocated by Irving Fisher and others and implemented by Ben Strong at the Federal Reserve – was misguided, and lamented that Fisher’s Stable Money Association (a successor to the Stable Money League) had turned the ‘concept of price stabilization as the objective of monetary policy into a virtually unassailable dogma’.57 In a capitalist economy, Hayek said, continuous advances in productivity mean that consumer prices have a natural tendency to decline.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

The Fed had a dual mandate: to support employment and to maintain price stability.30 In contrast, the ECB’s only objective was to maintain price stability. However, these mandate differences do not explain why the Fed and the ECB went in opposite directions.31 The ECB was required to achieve price stability over the “medium term,” over a two-​year period during which slowing activity was likely to lower the inflation rate. Trying to bring inflation down instantly could only choke the economy and cause an unnecessarily painful economic downturn. In practice, therefore, central banks with a price stability objective act to counter recessions in the same way as the dual mandate Fed does.

The view was that even a bad rule is better than no rule. The ECB, set up to conduct the single monetary policy, reinforced the stability ideology through its commitment to price stability. Two Nobel Laureates in economics, Franco Modigliani and Robert Solow, warned that excessive commitment to price stability would restrain output growth and, hence, would raise the eurozone’s unemployment rate. Moreover, like the budget rule, price stability when pursued unthinkingly, can—​as it did during the eurozone’s financial crisis—​become a source of instability. But the ECB’s stability ideology is even more insulated from criticism than the budget rule, because the ECB is accountable to no one.

The German position won the day because there appeared to be no other legitimate option. The proposed central bank’s independence necessarily came with a simple rule to determine the conduct of monetary policy. Achieving price stability would be the only goal of the ECB. Unlike the Fed, which famously had a “dual mandate” of fostering both price stability and “maximum sustainable employment,” the ECB would not act specifically to improve employment prospects. The ECB’s focus on price stability was less controversial than the simple fiscal rules were. Some prominent voices, however, did object. Franco Modigliani, an MIT economics professor and Nobel laureate, along with his colleague and fellow Nobel laureate Robert Solow, warned that the ECB’s mandate would make it focus obsessively on keeping inflation low.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In the twenty-five years before the Bank of England adopted an inflation target in 1992, prices rose by over 750 per cent, more than over the previous two hundred and fifty years.12 Inflation was simply taken for granted. Price stability seemed an unlikely state of affairs. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed, defined price stability as when ‘inflation is so low and stable over time that it does not materially enter into the decisions of households and firms’.13 Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was Greenspan’s deputy at the Federal Reserve Board, put it even more clearly. Price stability, he said, was ‘when ordinary people stop talking and worrying about inflation’.14 In recent years, we have started to take price stability for granted; so much so that some people have become exercised about the possibility of deflation – when prices fall.

The first is to ensure that in good times the amount of money grows at a rate sufficient to maintain broad stability of the value of money, and the second is to ensure that in bad times the amount of money grows at a rate sufficient to provide the liquidity – a reserve of future purchasing power – required to meet unpredictable swings in the demand for it by the private sector (see Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Those two functions are rather simple to state, if hard to carry out. They correspond to the twin objectives of price stability and the provision of liquidity by a ‘lender of last resort’. Price stability – inflation targeting as a coping strategy Eighteenth-century thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, understood the relationship between the amount of money in circulation and the prices at which goods and services were bought and sold: ‘if we consider any kingdom by itself, it is evident, that the greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence; since the prices of commodities are always proportioned to the plenty of money’.11 In the long run, more money means higher prices.

There was an underlying need to find a way to retain domestic control over the supply of money and liquidity while at the same time retaining a long-term commitment to price stability. Unfortunately, the switch from a fixed rule, such as the gold standard, to the use of unfettered discretion led to the failure to control inflation, culminating in the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Attention turned to the idea of delegating monetary policy to independent central banks with a clear mandate to achieve price stability. Central banks were not born with independence, they had it thrust upon them – literally, in the case of Germany when, after the Second World War, the Allies imposed the model of an independent central bank.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

The ECB’s representatives—and at the fore its president Jean-Claude Trichet—were most proud of their record in delivering an inflation performance superior to even the historic legacy of the stability-focused German Bundesbank. Perfectly in line with the ECB’s primary mandate of price stability, inflation had averaged 1.97 percent during the euro’s first decade. This illustrates a defining factor of the ECB’s economic principles: its primary objective, as written in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, is to maintain price stability. This contrasts with the US Fed, for example, which has a dual mandate of both price and economic stability. This focus on price stability is a clear heritage from the Bundesbank, which adopted a hawkish position after the previous historical inflation episodes that Germans had experienced.

The emphasis shifted first to credit growth, which was also seen as an early-warning indicator of financial imbalances, and then to a broad range of monetary and financial variables.6 The search for a new approach became evident in a high-level conference organized in 2006.7 Finally, the ECB restated its definition of price stability. When the euro was created, the ECB had taken the initiative of quantifying its definition of price stability, which the Maastricht Treaty left to the ECB’s Governing Council. It thus “took control” over that definition, whereas, for instance, in the United Kingdom that power belongs to the executive (the chancellor of the exchequer). The ECB initially decided that price stability would be achieved if inflation was below 2 percent. It was immediately confronted with a barrage of questions by economists and market participants.

As the relentless logic of events went on, the French appeared ever more French and the Germans ever more German. The Maastricht Negotiations: Ambiguities and Master Plans The Maastricht Treaty—the document that provides the legal framework for the euro—lies at the root of the current problems. It assumed too simply that price stability was sufficient to ensure financial stability and that fiscal policy had no role to play in the provision of price stability. It allowed French and German thinkers and politicians to operate with incompatible visions of economic governance. In short, it was about what the treaty labeled “European Union,” but the Europeans looked as if they did not really intend or understand the concept of “union.”


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

However, this would lead to increased costs for gold producers that would eventually lower production and reestablish the long-term trend of price stability. Conversely, if economic productivity increased due to technology, the price level would fall temporarily, which meant the purchasing power of money would go up. This would cause holders of gold jewelry to sell and would increase gold mining efforts, leading eventually to increased gold supply and a restoration of price stability. In both cases, the temporary supply and demand shocks in gold led to changes in behavior that restored long-term price stability. In international trade, these supply and demand factors equilibrated in the same way.

Once businesses and investors have greater certainty and price stability, they can then take greater risk on new investments. There is enough uncertainty in entrepreneurship without adding inflation, deflation, interest rates and exchange rates to the list of barriers standing in the way of innovation. The U.S. economy as guided by the Fed has seen continual asset bubbles, crashes, panics, booms and busts in the forty years since the United States left gold. It is time to diminish the role of finance and empower the role of commerce. Gold produces the greatest price stability in prices and asset values and therefore provides the best visibility for investors.

., were extremely stable), there were few policy conflicts among nations, speculation was stabilizing (i.e., investment behavior tended to bring currencies back to equilibrium after being displaced), adjustment was quick, liquidity was abundant, public and private confidence in the international monetary system remained high, nations experienced long-term price stability (predictability) at low levels of inflation, long-term trends in industrial production and income growth were favorable and unemployment remained fairly low. This highly positive assessment by Gallarotti is echoed by a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which concludes, “Economic performance in the United States and the United Kingdom was superior under the classical gold standard to that of the subsequent period of managed fiduciary money.”


pages: 363 words: 98,024

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government by Paul Volcker, Christine Harper

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, income per capita, inflation targeting, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, Nixon shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning

Our experience in the mid-1970s, when weak anti-inflation efforts failed, and again in the early 1980s, when a much more sustained effort was required, were reminders enough of the importance of maintaining price stability once it is restored. Now the environment is quite different. The generation with direct experience of stagflation is passing on. In contrast, over the past thirty years we’ve maintained sufficient price stability to engrain expectations of little or no inflation into our thinking. Factors such as cheap imports from countries like China have helped, but our monetary authorities have clearly recognized the importance of maintaining price stability. There can be little question that those firmly grounded expectations have contributed enormously in allowing the United States to absorb huge budget deficits and a massive injection of official liquidity during and after the 2008 financial crisis without reawakening inflationary forces.

Within a year or so the inflation rate fell to about 2 percent. The central bank head, Donald Brash, became a kind of traveling salesman. He had a lot of customers. I was reminded of the practical appeal when I read of a colloquy in a July 1996 FOMC meeting about the Federal Reserve’s “price stability” target. Janet Yellen asked then chairman Alan Greenspan: “How do you define price stability?” To me, he gave the only sensible answer: “That state in which expected changes in the general price level do not effectively alter business or household decisions.” Janet persisted: “Could you please put a number on that?” And so Alan’s general principle, to me entirely appropriate, was eventually translated into a number.

There seemed to be a lot of potential material available. But I had not yet lifted a finger to start. I remember my first visit to my designated faculty advisor, Professor Frank Graham. Unbeknownst to me, he happened to be one of the leading American scholars of international trade and was convinced that price stability was a key objective of public policy. When I told him about my idea and expressed concern that I might run out of time, he responded reassuringly: “Don’t worry, May is a long time off.” “But I’m scheduled for a February graduation.” “Oh! We’d better get started!” For once in my academic life I did.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

By the early 1990s, central bankers settled on solutions involving a strong legal mandate for price stability, independence of the central bank from control by elected officials, and sustained communication to markets that they would keep inflation muted. Thus, the European Central Bank states unequivocally: “The primary objective of the ECB’s monetary policy is to maintain price stability. This is the best contribution monetary policy can make to economic growth and job creation.” The ECB defines price stability as “a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the euro area of below 2 percent. In the pursuit of price stability, the ECB aims at maintaining inflation rates below, but close to, 2 percent over the medium term.”1 The belief held that if the central banks played their role in macroeconomic stabilization, especially by muting inflation, then the market could do the rest and ensure high growth and efficient allocation of resources.

Germany had experienced hyperinflation in the 1920s, and this event cemented a post-1945 political consensus that the new Bundesbank had to ensure price stability above all else. In the eyes of many, hyperinflation was to blame for the weakening of Germany’s embryonic democracy. Yet Hitler and the rise of fascism were born, in an immediate sense, as a result of the high level of unemployment that was part of the global Great Depression of the 1930s—not of Germany’s hyperinflation of the 1920s. But given the consensus on inflation in Germany and some of its northern European allies, any European agreement on a common currency had to be rooted in a commitment to price stability. Moreover, these countries obsessed over fears that fiscal profligacy in southern Europe would somehow lead to EU-wide inflation and demanded the constraints on debt and deficits discussed in Chapter 1.

What follows are some ideas that might create the flexibility that the ECB and European monetary policy so desperately need: ■ Use the discretion that Maastricht does provide. Price stability at the ECB currently means below but close to 2 percent. But this number is not specified by the Maastricht Treaty; it is an interpretation. Why is it not zero? Why not 3 percent? There is no legal answer to these questions. It is a matter of judgment. Setting a higher inflation target could help close the deep fissures between the European core and periphery. It could also broaden the interpretation still further to state that price stability means inflation “not below 1 per cent and not above 4 per cent,” thus providing more room within which it could exercise discretion


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

Most economists would agree that high-unemployment economies like Canada suffer from inadequate real wage flexibility; Fortin’s evidence suggests, however, that the cause of that inflexibility lies not in structual, microeconomic problems but in the Bank of Canada’s excessive anti-inflationary zeal. In short, the belief that absolute price stability is a huge blessing, that it brings large benefits with few if any costs, rests not on evidence but on faith. The evidence actually points strongly the other way: The benefits of price stability are elusive, the costs of getting there are large, and zero inflation may not be a good thing even in the long run. Suppose you reject both the miracle cures of the growth sect and the old-time religion of the stable-price sect.

In the United States, powerful groups on both left and right now propagandize incessantly for the belief that we can grow our problems away; aside from creating the possibility that we will rediscover the joys of stagflation, this campaign seriously weakens our already faltering resolve to put our fiscal house in order. But the bigger risk is probably in Europe, where—despite a far worse employment performance than in the United States—the rhetoric of price stability goes largely unchallenged, and is likely to have growing influence over actual policy. In particular, what will happen if EMU comes to pass? The new European Central Bank will operate under a constitution that honors price stability above all else; more important, it will feel that it must demonstrate itself a worthy successor to the Bundesbank, which means that it will try to implement in practice the kind of policy the Bundesbank follows only in theory.

To be skeptical about the prospects for rapid growth is, it turns out, to run the risk of being identified with another, equally misguided camp: that which believes that controlling inflation is the only priority of policy, that nothing can be done to fight recession and unemployment. This belief, especially acute among central bankers, is arguably imposing huge, gratuitous economic pain in much of the world; the third piece here, “A Good Word for Inflation,” focuses mainly on Europe and makes the case against a single-minded emphasis on price stability, while the fourth essay argues that monetary passivity accounts for much (not all) of Japan’s economic malaise. Finally, in “Seeking the Rule of the Waves,” I made use of a book review assignment to say some things I always wanted to say about economics, history, and the reasons why the business cycle is surely nowhere near dead.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

But if full employment and full use of capacity is taken as the norm of economic policy, as in modern times it is, then the rate of investment associated with full use of capacity is also normal. A policy which holds production below capacity in the interest of price stability inescapably sacrifices economic growth. IV So long as the use of fiscal policy is in unresolved conflict with other and prior economic goals, it will not be used with effective vigor, at least in peacetime. This conflict and the resulting inutility of fiscal measures are not yet widely conceded by economists. The textbooks still elucidate the use of fiscal measures as a device for ensuring price stability. They concede that we must settle for something less than completely full employment and that this will offer difficulties.

Nor is it certain that the controls which would serve to arrest the wage-price spiral would have to be comprehensive. It is possible that very limited restraints will serve to reconcile capacity output and price stability. This is an important point to which this essay will return. The prices fixed by controls are already fixed by monopoly or oligopoly power. Here nothing decisive is changed. However, for the moment it is sufficient to note that price and wage control, as a way of reconciling price stability, maximum product and minimum unemployment, is in conflict, no less important if it is ostensible rather than real, with historic attitudes toward production. 3 V A word of summary is now in order.

Inequality [>] 8. Economic Security [>] 9. The Paramount Position of Production [>] 10. The Imperatives of Consumer Demand [>] 11. The Dependence Effect [>] 12. The Vested Interest in Output [>] 13. The Bill Collector Cometh [>] 14. Inflation [>] 15. The Monetary Illusion [>] 16. Production and Price Stability [>] 17. The Theory of Social Balance [>] 18. The Investment Balance [>] 19. The Transition [>] 20. The Divorce of Production from Security [>] 21. The Redress of Balance [>] 22. The Position of Poverty [>] 23. Labor, Leisure and the New Class [>] 24. On Security and Survival [>] Afterword [>] Index [>] * * * INTRODUCTION TO THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION PUBLISHING A NEW EDITION of a book after forty years one faces a serious question: How much should one change to reflect later thought?


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Or maybe Congress could help fine-tune the economy with better real-time adjustments in government spending and taxation? Recall that the Fed chooses its own definition of full employment. For them, maximum employment is defined as the level of unemployment it believes is necessary to hit its inflation target. In other words, although it’s legally responsible for full employment and price stability, one goal takes clear priority over the other. If it takes eight or ten million unemployed people to stabilize prices, then that is how the Fed defines full employment. It’s counterintuitive to define full employment as a certain level of unemployment. But politically speaking, it is useful for the Fed as it means they get to claim success by defining away the very problem they were tasked to solve.

A recession that could have been quickly reversed with the right fiscal prescription instead became the longest and most protracted downturn in the post–World War II era. To make sure that never happens again, MMT recommends a shift away from the current reliance on central banks to deliver on the twin goals of full employment and price stability. Inflation and Unemployment: The MMT Approach The economists behind MMT recognize that there are real limits to spending, and that attempting to push beyond those limits can manifest in excessive inflation. However, we believe there are better ways to manage those kinds of inflationary pressures and that it can be done without trapping millions of people in perpetual unemployment.

It’s also not enough to rely exclusively on Congress to adjust government spending and taxation to fight off inflation once it begins to accelerate. To supplement discretionary fiscal policy (the steering wheel), MMT recommends a federal job guarantee, which creates a nondiscretionary automatic stabilizer that promotes both full employment and price stability. Think of a poorly maintained roadway. You get a smooth ride until you encounter a pothole or a bump in the road. You can try to steer clear of hazards, but at some point, you’re destined to hit one. At that point, you could be in for a rough ride. If you’ve got a vehicle with good shock absorbers, they’ll buffer the impact, and you won’t get jostled around too much.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

“To the extent that there is no trade-off,” Yellen replied, covering her back carefully, “then price stability, literally zero inflation, is good and we should go for it.” This seemed like a dodge. Maybe, if Yellen was still around when the United States next experienced a harsh recession, she would decide that there was actually a trade-off—in which case she might go back to worrying about unemployment rather than just targeting inflation. “Is long-term price stability an appropriate goal of the Federal Reserve System?” Greenspan pressed her. “Mr. Chairman, will you define ‘price stability’ for me?” Yellen parried. “Price stability is that state in which expected changes in the general price level do not effectively alter business or household decisions.”

More than a year had passed since Black Monday, and the sustained tranquility of the stock market had taught him a lesson: if the imperatives of financial stability and price stability were pulling him in different ways, he could prioritize stable prices, knowing that if markets crashed he had the power to contain the damage. Moreover, the warning of the previous August stuck in his mind: if Wall Street came to believe that he was gun-shy, inflation expectations would rise, and it would take enormous effort to force them back down again. The future central-bank consensus—that price stability trumped other objectives—was not yet entrenched. But it was taking shape beneath the surface.

He summoned the entire membership of the Fed’s interest-rate-setting body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), over to the White House and did his best to frighten them. “The present emergency is the greatest this country has ever faced, including the two World Wars and all the preceding wars,” he menaced. But the central bankers stood their ground. Chairman McCabe objected that military power depended on economic power, and that this required price stability. The administration then tried to beat the central bankers into submission: it issued a public statement claiming that the Fed had pledged to defend the 2.5 percent borrowing-cost ceiling. But the Fed leaders countered by leaking their own account of the meeting, which pointedly excluded any such commitment.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

Secondly, in 1717 Newton, as Master of the Mint, fixed the value of the pound at £3 17s 10½d per standard ounce of 22 carat gold, equivalent to a fine gold price of just under £4 4s 11½d. The Bank was obliged to convert its notes into gold on demand at this price. This remained sterling’s gold price for two hundred years, except for its suspension in the Napoleonic wars. Sound money triumphed, and the record was one of long-run price stability; between 1717 and the First World War, the average annual rate of inflation was just 0.53 per cent. But there were considerable short-run fluctuations; the average magnitude of annual price changes was 4.42 per cent.7 The establishment of the Bank of England and Newton’s rule made it much safer to lend to the state.

And even Keynes had to emancipate himself from the quantity theory before he felt he could accurately analyse the economic problem to which money gave rise. The key belief of the pre-1914 monetary reformers was that instability in the price level generates not just economic but social instability, by producing unanticipated shifts in the level of activity and distribution of wealth. The aim of economic policy ought therefore to be price stability. This policy prescription rested on the belief that, in a system of fiat money, the central bank has ultimate control over the quantity of money in circulation. If the central bank can control the quantity of money, either directly or indirectly, it has the power to make the price level what it wants it to be.

Once it came to be accepted as prudent, for social reasons, to use monetary policy to mitigate dislocating economic fluctuations, all the unsettled questions in monetary theory were reopened. Was the money supply exogenous or endogenous? What was the transmission mechanism from money to prices? Was the task of the central bank to control currency or credit? Was it possible to combine price stability with exchange-rate stability? The context of these discussions was the radical volatility of prices, very different from the muted modulations of the previous century: post-war hyperinflation in some countries being followed by price collapses. John Maynard Keynes and Edwin Cannan debated the causes of the wartime and post-war inflations in a re-run of the Currency versus Banking School debates of the early nineteenth century.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

In Bernanke’s view, it was largely due to the introduction of a successful monetary policy framework focused on ensuring price stability.29 In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and later Prime Minister, Gordon Brown declared that the Labour government (1997–2010) had aimed to avoid returning to the ‘boom and bust’ of previous eras. His confidence stemmed from his early decision to grant operational independence to the Bank of England in the conduct of a monetary policy. In his initial letter to the Bank of England, Brown wrote: ‘price stability is a precondition for high and stable levels of growth and employment, which in turn will create the conditions for price stability on a sustainable basis.’30 But the Great Moderation thesis was blown away by the global financial crisis.

Yellen, ‘Monetary policy and financial stability’, presented at the 2014 Michel Camdessus Central Banking Lecture, International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20140702a.htm (accessed 4 May 2016). 42 The Federal Reserve is charged with carrying out a dual mandate that includes maximum employment and price stability. This stands in contrast to the ECB, which has a sole mandate to deliver price stability. 43 As Michael Woodford recently put it, ‘I worry that . . . [we] let Congress off the hook a little too easily’: http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/Connecting-Policy-with-Frontier-Research/Michael-Woodford.cfm (accessed 4 May 2016). 44 Keynes, The General Theory, p. 372. 45 OECD, ‘Focus on top incomes and taxation in OECD countries: was the crisis a game changer?’

Maintaining that trust is particularly crucial in the case of a nation and a currency that has been, and still is, at the heart of the international financial system.’14 Since the dollar is not backed by any ‘real’ commodity, the entity that controls its quantity must be committed to price stability to ensure that citizens and businesses continue to accept their paper money. Today, having been given greater independence in the overall conduct of monetary policy, most central banks are explicitly committed to the pursuit of price stability as part of their constitutional mandates. Despite what many commentators may believe, central banks do not independently and directly inject money into the economy. Almost all of the money we use today has been created by private banks through their lending.


pages: 454 words: 134,482

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

To provide considerably greater stability than the present fiat-dollar regime, a revived U.S. gold standard would probably need to be part of a broader international revival.46 RULE-BOUND FIAT STANDARDS Given that the postwar fiat standards managed by discretionary central banks have generally failed to deliver the long-run price stability that was delivered by the gold standard, Finn Kydland and Mark Wynne (2002: 1) ask whether a better fiat regime is possible. They note that the “hard pegs” of dollarization or currency boards have proven successful at delivering more stable nominal environments in countries that have adopted them. But, they naturally ask, “What about the large country, the ‘peggee’? What rule or regime can a large country such as the United States . . . adopt to guarantee long-term price stability?” A well-known and very simple type of monetary rule is a fixed growth path for M2, as advocated by Milton Friedman in the 1960s.

These stated objectives suggest criteria by which to assess the Fed’s performance, namely, the relative extent of pre– and post–Federal Reserve Act price level changes, pre– and post–Federal Reserve Act output fluctuations and business recessions, and pre– and post–Federal Reserve Act financial crises. For reasons already given, we do not attempt to address the Fed’s success at bank supervision. INFLATION The Fed has failed conspicuously in one respect: far from achieving long-run price stability, it has allowed the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, which was hardly different on the eve of the Fed’s creation from what it had been at the time of the dollar’s establishment as the official U.S. monetary unit, to fall dramatically. A consumer basket selling for $100 in 1790 cost only slightly more, at $108, than its (admittedly very rough) equivalent in 1913.

(Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2009) More specifically, as Ben Bernanke (2006: 2) observed in a lecture several years ago, besides reducing the costs of holding money, stable prices allow people to rely on the dollar as a measure of value when making long-term contracts, engaging in long-term planning, or borrowing or lending for long periods. As economist Martin Feldstein has frequently pointed out, price stability also permits tax laws, accounting rules, and the like to be expressed in dollar terms without being subject to distortions arising from fluctuations in the value of money. Feldstein (1997) had, in fact, reckoned the recurring welfare cost of a steady inflation rate of just 2 percent—a cost stemming solely from the adverse effect of inflation on the real net return to saving—at about 1 percent of gross national product (GNP).5 As Bernanke’s remarks suggest, unpredictable changes in the price level have greater costs than predictable changes.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) Paper 42169, University Library of Munich. ———. 2012b. “New Estimates of U.S. Currency Abroad, the Domestic Money Supply and the Unreported Economy.” Crime, Law and Social Change 57 (3): 239–63. Feldstein, Martin. 1999. “The Costs and Benefits of Going from Low Inflation to Price Stability.” In The Costs and Benefits of Price Stability, ed. Martin Feldstein. Chicago: National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. “The Role for Discretionary Fiscal Policy in a Low Interest Rate Environment.” NBER Working Paper Series 9203 (September). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Available at http://www.fatf-gafi.org. Fischer, Bjorn, Petra Köhler, and Franz Seitz. 2004. “The Demand for Euro Currencies, Past, Present and Future.” European Central Bank Working Paper Series 330 (April). Frankfurt. Fischer, Stanley. 1996. “Why Are Central Banks Pursuing Long-Run Price Stability?” In Achieving Price Stability: A Symposium Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pp. 7–34. Jackson Hole, WY, August 29–31. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Fischer, Stanley, Ratna Sahay, and Carlos A. Végh. 2002. “Modern Hyper- and High Inflations.” Journal of Economic Literature 40 (3): 837–80.

During World War I, US inflation again soared to 19% in 1918.31 And then of course came the double-digit peacetime inflation of the 1970s. Indeed, there have been enough such episodes since the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 that prices in the United States have increased thirtyfold.32 So much for the Fed’s mandate to achieve price stability. Still, the United States has had less cumulative inflation than most advanced economies over the same period. We return to the risks of high inflation in chapter 12. FROM GOLD-BACKED TO PURE FIAT PAPER CURRENCY Since its early days in China and the colonial United States, the evolution of paper money has taken other important turns, eventually spreading across the world.


pages: 172 words: 54,066

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

He also acknowledged that there was little harm from moderate rates of inflation, meaning that if the Fed took this gamble and lost, there would be little cost associated with a rate of inflation that was stable, but slightly higher than the Fed’s target. I asked why the Fed shouldn’t take the virtually cost-free risk, and he responded by saying that the Fed is an institution that is committed to price stability. I pointed out that the Fed is also an institution that is committed to full employment, to which he replied that, “No one takes that commitment seriously.” When I suggested that he then also doesn’t need to take the commitment to price stability seriously, he responded, “Yes, I do.” [42] As a separate measure to slow consumption, Volcker also restricted the use of credit cards. At the time, the Fed had the ability to impose this type of credit control, but it does no longer

As a result, the workers who end up taking the biggest pay cuts in a downturn are those without college degrees and especially those without high school degrees.[18] High unemployment is a class-biased mechanism for fighting inflation. In effect it forces the less-advantaged groups in society to sacrifice to ensure that the more-advantaged can enjoy price stability – and a ready supply of low-cost labor to provide household help or serve them in hotels and restaurants. Weakening unions As another element of this process of upward redistribution, President Reagan took a number of steps to weaken the power of unions. Foremost was weakening the enforcement of labor laws that protect workers’ right to organize.

The Fed’s banker-friendly organizational structure was not an accident; it was first and foremost intended to serve the banks and only secondarily to serve the larger public. The Fed’s culture is thoroughly intermeshed with the financial industry. While its legal mandate from Congress places an equal priority on the goals of price stability and full employment,[40] the Fed has maintained a much greater commitment to the former goal than the latter. In fact, current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has openly committed the Fed to targeting inflation at 2 percent, a policy which implies that the Fed would be willing to tolerate high jobless rates if it were concerned that more expansionary policy would raise the rate of inflation above its target.


pages: 257 words: 94,168

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

High prices served to heighten awareness and fear of the dependence on oil resources residing in what many people view as potentially vulnerable, if not precarious, parts of the world and coming from secretive suppliers who administer cartel economic power. It should not be taken for granted that price stability is, in fact, best for OPEC to make money. Does price stability really maximize its profits? On the contrary, it is easy to imagine a world in which prices rise, plateau, and are then unexpectedly lowered by enhanced OPEC production. Consequently, non-OPEC investments in higher-cost and higher-risk oil exploration and production projects might stall and remain economically stranded as they suddenly become unprofitable.

In the long run, the wise use of an oil stockpile would provide greater price stability and greater Beyond Panic 219 security. The power of the OPEC cartel could be significantly tempered if most major oil-importing nations also built their own oil stockpiles, creating a de facto cartel consisting of non-OPEC members (perhaps called NOPEC). The US, as the consumer of about one-quarter of the annual global oil supply, is in a strong position to take the lead in countering OPEC reductions in exports and maintaining oil-price stability. Developing a US “economic petroleum reserve,” or national oil bank, would require 5.5 times the amount of oil stored in the SPR and an investment of perhaps $130 to $230 billion in oil purchases.

The relative political instability and lawlessness of these countries is perhaps an indication that they could not tolerate elimination of the significant income they obtain from oil exports. The point is that one potential unintended consequence of a reduction in oil use is social disintegration of some oil-exporting nations. How do oil price and price stability affect the future of transportation fuels? Consumers like inexpensive gasoline. In the US, the drop in gasoline price in 2009 to its long-term, historical average of $2.25 per gallon was a relief and economic benefit. However, at that price, the development of new, expensive offshore oil sources and alternative liquid fuels is not profitable.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

They seemed to favor 1 percent a month, or 12 percent a year.13 The whole Fed team marketed “price stability” as its sole function. In 2005, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President William Poole responded to the question of whether the institution should identify and manage asset price bubbles: “I’m really a hardliner on this. . . . I think it is incompatible with a market economy to have a government agency setting asset prices that are meant to allocate capital.”14 Milton Friedman also lectured from the audience: “The role of the Fed is to preserve price stability. Period. . . . It should not be concerned with the asset markets as such, only as they affect indirectly—somehow—the price stability as a whole.”15 The professor’s argument turns on itself.

(“But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”13) There was no mention of manias or crashes. He used the word bubble only to imply that he was not anxious: “We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability.” 10 FOMC meeting transcript, December 19, 1995, p. 35. 11 Ibid., p. 37. 12 Ibid. 13 Speech available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/ 19961205.htm. He was speaking in the midst of a stock market bubble, and almost everyone feared it or knew it, including the Federal Reserve.

The longer a bubble is allowed to inflate, the more it encourages the build-up of other imbalances, such as too much borrowing and investment, which have the power to turn a mild downturn into something nastier.”7 Greenspan’s speech met some resistance, but was generally accepted as gospel. Still, he may have found the Jackson Hole speech was not quite the success he had expected. He launched a two-pronged attack from the podium for the rest of the year. First, an embellishment of his “can’t see a bubble” line. Second, a new emphasis on “price stability.” Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on December 19, 2002, the chairman rationalized his inaction from a different angle: “The evidence of recent years, as well as the events of the late 1920s, casts doubt on the proposition that bubbles can be defused gradually.”8 This contradicted the chairman’s “Gold and Economic Freedom” essay of 1966.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The economic ideology of ‘Ordoliberalismus’, which had a profound influence upon the ‘social market economy’ introduced after the Second World War by Ludwig Erhardt, Germany’s immensely influential economics minister and subsequent chancellor, also gives German attitudes to economic policy special characteristics.21 This is a free-market ideology, which emphasizes constitutional rules, as against discretionary policy.22 It rejected the then highly influential Keynesian idea of discretionary macroeconomic stabilization from its inception, in favour of a central bank dedicated to price stability. While Germans have accepted a welfare state since the nineteenth century, under Erhardt’s influence they have also embraced the idea of market competition. One of the main roles of the state, in their view, is to promote competition. The solution to the Eurozone crisis from the German perspective, then, is to impose these principles throughout the Eurozone.

As Pettis puts it, ‘Excessive use of the US dollar internationally actually forces up either American debt or American unemployment.’31 Inevitably, the Fed chose debt over unemployment. Indeed, it is mandated to do so, because its task is to sustain the highest level of employment consistent with price stability (or, more precisely, stable and low inflation). Since the US has no exchange-rate policy and has been able to borrow freely in its own currency, and since, in addition, countries that target exchange rates usually do so against the dollar, the Federal Reserve has emerged automatically as the world’s macroeconomic balancer and the US economy as the one within which global balancing takes place.

First, this new orthodoxy gives enormous discretionary power to bureaucrats in managing the financial system in particular, which is the heart of the supposedly market economy. Second, the new orthodox doctrine does not resolve the confused relationship between the state and the private sector as suppliers of money. On the contrary, it reinforces that confusion. Third, the doctrine assumes that monetary policy can be targeted at price stability, while macroprudential policy is targeted at financial stability. More important, it is assumed that they will not get in each other’s way, with monetary policy sometimes undermining financial stability by encouraging excessive credit creation, and macroprudential policy undermining monetary policy by halting credit creation.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

Hence, independence is a monetary principle integral to sovereignty, and not an operational rule transforming the central bank into some kind of automaton. The foundational texts should invest the central banks with the mission of maintaining price stability. But in all their great wisdom, these texts should hold back from specifying what price stability is. For this would deny the central bank its own capacity for judgement in the face of unforeseeable contexts. Independence is a symbol that works if the central bank can adopt flexible policies to respond equitably to a variety of imbalances, without being suspected of threatening price stability. Central bank independence is by nature a symbolic guarantee, but its practice inserts it deep into the economy.

This means providing a framework that eliminates all balances outside of a range indicated by the central bank. This framework attaches itself to a renewed monetary doctrine: flexible inflation targeting.7 This means placing monetary policy’s short-term discretionary actions under the constraint of medium-term rules, thus assuring price stability. This stability is defined as a range of viable future inflation rates, within the scope of which the central bank’s actions enjoy the confidence of economic actors. Nonetheless, if central bank independence gives weight to the principle of guaranteeing the unit of account’s statistical value, this cannot be its exclusive concern.

Various structural factors influenced choices over monetary regulation: the existence or otherwise of developed public debt titles markets; the degree of protection of the banking system, and thus its solidity faced with the risk of insolvency; the predominance of intermediated financing or recourse to capital markets; the extent and tightness of exchange controls; and the explicit regulation of interest rates by the authorities, as well as their implicit regulation by the banking oligopoly. These were nationally separate systems of limited openness. Within these systems, monetary policy was a backup for an economic policy seeking firstly to achieve full employment, and secondly to stabilise the balance of payments. Price stability was only considered in relative terms: for the most open countries it had to be made competitive with inflation in other countries, while for the largest countries – first of all the United States – it was considered in terms of arbitrating between inflation and underemployment. Monetary regulation was divided between two poles, or two regimes that could be combined in different ways.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

It was under way in earnest while Greenspan was still the chair. He and Janet Yellen, then a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, sparred collegially over the Fed’s price stability goal at the central bank’s July 1996 meeting, for instance. While Congress had instructed the central bank to stabilize prices, it had become clear that nobody really knew what that meant in practice. “Mr. Chairman, will you define ‘price stability’ for me?” Yellen had asked.[23] “Price stability is that state in which expected changes in the general price level do not effectively alter business or household decisions,” Greenspan replied.

But because the central bank is only distantly accountable to voters, and because its role in our economy has expanded so much, society needs to pay attention to the Fed’s abilities—and experts, the media, interest groups, and the broader public must keep pressure on lawmakers to appoint and confirm apolitical central bankers. Fed independence has always been important, but it now matters to more than just price stability. If elected officials were to place partisan loyalists on the Fed Board, the unconventional and emergency tools that the central bank used in 2020 to help stabilize markets and the economy could instead be leveraged to quietly circumvent the democratic process. Favored constituencies or even a handful of favored companies could be given cheap credit through the Fed even if it proves too hard to pass funding for those entities through Congress.

The financial fiefdoms would be coordinated by a public supervising authority in Washington, the Federal Reserve Board, whose members would include five presidential appointees working alongside the comptroller of the currency and the Treasury secretary.[56][*6] The goal of the system was to smooth over seasonal disruptions in money flow both by centralizing reserves and by allowing the Fed banks to support short-term loans backed by agreements between suppliers and producers, called “real bills,”[57] to make sure that sufficient money was available at times when it was in high demand. The newly created Federal Reserve System was not especially powerful at its inception, nor did it have a spelled-out responsibility for either price stability or encouraging employment, which would go on to become its most well-known missions.[58] It was supposed to protect the system against painful panics and keep credit flowing by lending to member banks against good collateral when they needed cash to avoid a crunch. It was also intended to elevate the prominence of the little-used United States dollar in global trade.[59] Its ambitions more or less stopped there.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

But since the rise of neo-liberalism, and its ‘monetarist’ approach to macroeconomics, in the 1980s, the focus of macroeconomic policies has radically changed. The ‘monetarists’ are called as such because they believe that prices rise when too much money is chasing after a given quantity of goods and services. They also argue that price stability (i.e., keeping inflation low) is the foundation of prosperity and, therefore, that monetary discipline (which is required for price stability) should be the paramount goal of macroeconomic policy. When it comes to developing countries, the need for monetary discipline is even more emphasized by the Bad Samaritans. They believe that most developing countries do not have the self-discipline to ‘live within their means’; it is alleged that they print money and borrow as if there were no tomorrow.

But this populist rhetoric obscures the fact that the policies needed to generate low inflation are likely to reduce the future earnings of most working people by reducing their employment prospects and wage rates. The price of price stability Upon taking power from the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC (African National Congress) government of South Africa declared that it would pursue an IMF-style macroeconomic policy. Such a cautious approach was considered necessary if it was not to scare away investors, given its leftwing, revolutionary history. In order to maintain price stability, interest rates were kept high; at their peak in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the real interest rates were 10–12%.

The data are from Singh (1995), Table 8. 12 The details are from F. Alvarez & S. Zeldes (2001), ‘Reducing Inflation in Argentina: Mission Impossible?’ http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/szeldes/Cases/Argentina/ 13 Moreover, in the neo-liberal argument, economic stability is wrongly equated with price stability. Price stability is, of course, an important part of overall economic stability, but the stabilities in output and employment are also important. If we define economic stability more broadly, we cannot say that neo-liberal macroeconomic policy has succeeded even in its self-proclaimed goal of achieving economic stability over the past two and a half decades, as output and employment instabilities have actually increased during this period.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

But since the rise of neo-liberalism, and its ‘monetarist’ approach to macroeconomics, in the 1980s, the focus of macroeconomic policies has radically changed. The ‘monetarists’ are called as such because they believe that prices rise when too much money is chasing after a given quantity of goods and services. They also argue that price stability (i.e., keeping inflation low) is the foundation of prosperity and, therefore, that monetary discipline (that is required for price stability) should be the paramount goal of macroeconomic policy. When it comes to developing countries, the need for monetary discipline is even more emphasized by the Bad Samaritans. They believe that most developing countries do not have the self-discipline to ‘live within their means’; it is alleged that they print money and borrow as if there were no tomorrow.

But this populist rhetoric obscures the fact that the policies needed to generate low inflation are likely to reduce the future earnings of most working people by reducing their employment prospects and wage rates. The price of price stability Upon taking power from the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC (African National Congress) government of South Africa declared that it would pursue an IMF-style macroeconomic policy. Such a cautious approach was considered necessary if it was not to scare away investors, given its leftwing, revolutionary history. In order to maintain price stability, interest rates were kept high; at their peak in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the real interest rates were 10–12%.

The data are from Singh (1995), Table 8. 12 The details are from F. Alvarez & S. Zeldes (2001), ‘Reducing Inflation in Argentina: Mission Impossible?’ http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/szeldes/Cases/Argentina/ 13 Moreover, in the neo-liberal argument, economic stability is wrongly equated with price stability. Price stability is, of course, an important part of overall economic stability, but the stabilities in output and employment are also important. If we define economic stability more broadly, we cannot say that neo-liberal macroeconomic policy has succeeded even in its self-proclaimed goal of achieving economic stability over the past two and a half decades, as output and employment instabilities have actually increased during this period.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

This, plus a turn in economics to more microeconomic approaches provided the political representatives of capital – Kalecki’s “Powerful Block” – with their new software. We call this set of ideas “neoliberalism”. But to run this new software you had to do more than simply tweak the old hardware. You had to fundamentally reconfigure it once again. The new policy target for v.3.0 was not full employment – for that produced inflation – but “price stability” – that is, guarding against inflation at all costs. Although raising interest rates will crush inflation in the short term, to make this permanent hardware changes were needed that would destroy the ability of the system to generate inflation in the first place. There were four key hardware changes that took place in the 1980s, which took inflation out of the system permanently, restored the value of capital, and in doing so built the world that we grew up in.

And so, over the course of the 1990s, this hardware modification spread across almost all the machines running the software for v.3.0 as central bank independence, and the rise of the central banker as the most powerful policy-maker in the land, spread across the OECD and beyond.21 The result was a system that was once again similar across those countries that produced common outputs, but those outputs were the complete opposite of v.2.0. Comparing versions 2.0 and 3.0 in a table can clarify this. Capitalism v.2.0 1945–80 Capitalism v.3.0 1980– Policy target: Policy target: Full employment Price stability (low inflation) Policy outcomes: Policy outcomes: Labour’s share of GDP at historic highs Capital’s share of GDP at historic highs Corporate profits low or stagnant Wages low or stagnant Inequality low Inequality high Markets mostly national Markets globalized Trade unions strong Trade unions weak Finance weak and immobile Finance strong and highly mobile Central banks weak and politicized Central banks strong and independent Legislatures strong Legislatures weak MARK: But as you stressed in the previous dialogue, Eric, one of the reasons v.3.0 lasted as long, if not longer, than v.2.0, was the fact that it worked.

ERIC: In the absence of inflation, it is true that we have a great deal more fiscal and monetary flexibility. MMT economists don’t have a credible explanation of why inflation is dead. Hyman Minsky, their intellectual forefather, was completely wrong about inflation. Ironically, some of their policies might undermine price stability and end up limiting fiscal flexibility as a consequence. As you argued so forcefully in your book Austerity, and which has since become the consensus, aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus should be used to counter recessions. But when the resources of the economy are fully employed, increasing the role of government requires resources to be taken from somewhere else.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Haraf and Rose Marie Kushmeider, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy and Research, 1988; and Anna Schwartz, ‘Why Financial Stability Depends on Price Stability’, in Money, Prices and the Real Economy, ed. Geoffrey Wood, Northampton: Edward Elgar, 1998. See also Ben Bernanke and Mark Gertler, ‘Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility’, Economic Review 4, 1999. 37 Michael Bordo and David Wheelock, ‘Price Stability and Financial Stability: The Historical Record’, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 80:4, 1998, pp. 41–62. Michael Bordo, Michael J. Dueker, and David Wheelock, ‘Aggregate Price Shocks and Financial Instability: A Historical Analysis’, Working Paper 2000–005B, Federal Reserve Bank of St.

Note that Karl Case and Robert Shiller realized that bubble conditions were in place already by the early 2000s, but expected the situation to stabilize (‘Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, 2003). At the BIS, however, William White argued that central bank should ‘lean against the wind’ by raising interest rates when bubbles threatened, even if price stability and growth targets were not compromised (‘Procyclicality in the Financial System’, BIS Working Paper No. 193, 2006; ‘Is Price Stability Enough?’, BIS Working Paper No. 205, 2006). In contrast, Ben Bernanke, who became the head of the US Federal Reserve, argued that credit and asset bubbles should be allowed to follow their course, the authorities intervening aggressively only after the bubble would have burst (‘The Global Saving Glut and the U.S.

Rather, the malfunctioning of money is partly due to the complex processes linking real accumulation to the monetary circulation, as was discussed in Chapter 4. Inflation is also the outcome of poor performance by capitalist accumulation, rather than being simply the result of faulty monetary processes. Second, the underlying assumption of inflation targeting was that the achievement of price stability would also result in overall financial stability. This view was put across by Anna Schwartz and was adopted generally for much of the period of Great Moderation.36 For Schwartz, financial instability arises primarily from unexpected changes in the rate of inflation. If the central bank focused on keeping inflation low, it would thereby reduce the risk of lending booms (induced by high inflation) and recessions (induced by unexpected deflation or disinflation).


pages: 275 words: 82,640

Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman

Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, currency peg, double entry bookkeeping, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, German hyperinflation, income per capita, law of one price, Money creation, money market fund, oil shock, price anchoring, price stability, Savings and loan crisis, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

In light of the experience of forty centuries, only the short time perspective of politicians and voters can explain the repeated re-sort to price and wage controls (Schuettinger and Butler 1979). Institutional Reform to Promote Price Stability The repeated ups and downs in the price level have generated a vast literature offering and analyzing proposals for institutional reform designed to promote price stability. My own suggestions have centered on means of assuring that the quantity of money will grow at a relatively constant rate.* Recently, Robert Hetzel has made an ingenious proposal that may be more feasible politically than my own earlier proposals for structural change, yet that promises to be highly effective in restraining the inflationary bias that infects government.

.* I also hasten to add that this judgment is not intended either to denigrate or to praise the character or the intentions of the various parties in the long-running dispute. The pro-silver group contained silver producers seeking to promote their special interests, inflationists eager to seize any vehicle for that purpose, and sincere bimetallists who desired neither inflation nor deflation but were persuaded that bimetallism was more conducive to price stability than monometallism was. Similarly, the pro-gold group contained producers of gold, deflationists (pilloried by the free-silver forces as Wall Street bankers), and sincere believers that the gold standard was the only satisfactory pillar for a financially stable society. Motives and intentions matter far less than the outcome.

Holders of standard bonds, but not indexed bonds, would suffer a capital loss. Indeed, all creditors receiving payment in dollars in the future would feel threatened. The ease of associating increases in expected inflation with particular monetary policy actions will encourage creditors to exert a pressure that would counteract political pressures to trade off price stability for short-term output gains. (1991, p. A14) In explaining his proposal, Hetzel notes: The long lag between monetary policy actions and inflation means that it is difficult to associate particular policy actions with the rate of inflation. Changes in expected inflation registered in changes in the difference in yields between standard and indexed bonds would provide an immediate and continuous assessment by the market of the expected effects on inflation of current monetary policy actions (or inactions).


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Fisher, a New Era economist, had a great deal of faith in America's new central bank and expected the Federal Reserve to intervene if a crisis arose. Fisher Is Deceived by Price Stability According to Fisher, the key variable to monitor in the monetary equation was P, the general price level. If prices were relatively stable, there could be no major crisis or depression. Price stabilization was Fisher's principal monetary goal in the 1920s. He also felt that the international gold standard could not achieve price stability on its own. It needed the help of the Federal Reserve, which was established in late 1913 in order to create liquidity and prevent depressions and crises.

Mark Blaug calls him "one of the greatest and certainly one of the most colorful American economists who has ever lived" (Blaug 1986, 77). Fisher's entire career, both professional and personal, was devoted to the issue of money and credit. He invented the famed Quantity Theory of Money, and created the first price indexes. He became a crusader for many causes, from healthy living to price stability. He wrote over thirty books. He was a wealthy inventor (of today's Rolodex, or card catalog system) who became the Oracle on Wall Street, but was destroyed financially by the 1929-33 stock market crash. Fisher's failure as a monetarist to anticipate the greatest economic collapse in the twentieth century must lie squarely with his incomplete monetary model of the economy, and it was this defective model that led directly to the development of Keynesian economics, the subject of our next chapter.

When Somary expressed pessimism about the future of the stock market, Keynes declared firmly, "We will not have any more crashes in our time" (Somary 1986 [ 1960], 146-47). Somary had been trained in Austrian economics at the University of Vienna and knew that the New Era boom was unsustainable. But Keynes, like Irving Fisher, ignored the Austrians and pinned his hopes on the Federal Reserve and price stabilization. In late 1928, Keynes wrote two papers disputing that a "dangerous inflation" was developing on Wall Street, concluding that there was "nothing which can be called inflation yet in sight." Referring to both real estate and stock values in the United States, Keynes added, "I conclude that it would be premature today to assert the existence of over-investment. ...


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

While the Fed had no explicit mandate to focus on the stock market, the effects of the run-up in prices seemed to me a legitimate concern. In quelling inflation, we had established that price stability is central to long-term economic growth. (In fact, one major factor causing stock prices to rise was investors' growing confidence that stability would continue.) Yet the concept of price stability wasn't as self-evident as it seemed. There were probably ten different statistical series on prices you could look at. For most economists, price stability referred to product prices—the cost of a pair of socks or a quart of milk. But what about the prices of incomeearning assets, like stocks or real estate?

Central bankers over the past several decades have absorbed an important principle: Price stability is the path to maximum sustainable economic *However, America's reputation has been s o m e w h a t diminished by t h e thwarting of high-profile foreign acquisitions—of Unocal, by a Chinese company, in 2 0 0 5 , and of a company that managed U.S. ports, by D u b a i Ports World, in 2 0 0 6 . t G i v e n t h e u p w a r d bias of measured prices, a 1 percent reported rate of price increase probably represents an economy with price stability. 389 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright.

But what about the prices of incomeearning assets, like stocks or real estate? What if those prices were to inflate and become unstable? Shouldn't we worry about the price stability of nest eggs and not just the eggs you buy at the grocery store? It wasn't that I wanted to stand up and shout, "The stock market is overvalued and it will lead to no good." I didn't believe that. But I thought it important to put the issue on the table. 175 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. T H E AGE OF T U R B U L E N C E The concept of irrational exuberance came to me in the bathtub one morning as I was writing a speech.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Because a valid public policy goal is to maintain maximum sustainable employment, Congress charged the Fed with a mandate on top of price stability: keeping a lid on unemployment.8 When inflation and unemployment both worsened during the 1970s, senior officials said wait a moment; very loose monetary policies cause high inflation. We’ve all seen the cost of inflation. Let’s make central banks independent and give them only one key goal: price stability. Stable prices blunt inflation and negative consequences that debase the value of fiat currencies. Chastened by stagflation that proved so hard to defeat, many central banks—but not the Fed—restored the focus on price stability only. They proposed an inflation target that would encourage lending without jeopardizing price levels.

Yet during the COVID-19 crisis, the direct monetization of fiscal deficits and debts became a de facto norm. The European Central Bank, launched in 1998 with a mandate to maintain price stability, has scrambled to redefine its purpose in an uncharted environment. “Crisis management has taken the central bank well beyond its strict treaty mandate,” the New York Times reported in 2010, when Jean-Claude Trichet was the bank’s president.14 “It has become much more difficult for Mr. Trichet to sum up its role with the mantra, ‘We have only one needle in our compass and that is price stability.’” Indeed, the Times reported that the ECB “has experienced what the US military calls ‘mission creep,’ shouldering responsibility—for lack of any other federal European institution—for stabilizing the eurozone economy and financial system.”

In this chapter, we’ll look at a more subtle and insidious threat of financial instability and chaos. Instead of throttling back on their experiments and applying due caution, central banks have accelerated mission creep in the last few years. What, exactly, is the role of the Fed and other central banks? Once upon a time, they cared only about price stability. Then they set their sights on growth and unemployment. After the global financial crisis they started to care also about financial stability. Now they have also embraced “average inflation targeting,” using the tools at their disposal to try to reach an average rate of 2 percent over time, thus allowing the target to be overshot on a temporary basis.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

And I have often thought since how fascinating it would have been to stage a debate between Friedman and Keynes.14 Friedman believes that Keynes’s most original contribution to economic theory was his “emphasis on the conflict between the stability of prices and the stability of exchange.”15 Like Keynes, Friedman believes that domestic price stability is more important than international exchange rate stability, though he would like to see both. Indeed, he believes that the surest, and perhaps only, way to achieve stable international exchange rates would be for all nations to have stable domestic price levels. The goals of domestic price stability and international exchange rate stability are thus in the long run not in conflict but in harmony. Friedman feels that a national economy is more stable than Keynesian analysis postulates.

He made reference to the “inflationary pressure of abnormally high government expenditures”6; only later did he come to emphasize that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Simons was not, incidentally, a consistent monetarist, if he is considered to have been a monetarist at all. He wrote in 1936 in “Rules versus Authorities in Monetary Policy,” speaking of the goal of price stabilization: “The task is certainly not one to be entrusted to banking authorities, with their limited powers and restricted techniques, as should be abundantly evident from recent experience. Ultimate control over the value of money lies in fiscal practices—in the spending, taxing, and borrowing operations of the central government....

His two best lifetime friends, George Stigler and Allen Wallis, died in 1991 and 1998 respectively. Friedman’s final position with respect to monetary policy was that it should seek stable aggregate prices. He favored neither inflation nor deflation. He became more optimistic with respect to the possibility of central banks as currently constituted to achieve price stability than he was in the past, believing that will is very important to control inflation. He feared that some decades hence, the world will forget what causes inflation and that all of the old, inaccurate purported causes of inflation (greedy employers, grasping employees, etc.) will return to the fore.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This story should serve as a warning. Too much faith is placed today in natural rate theory. For the past quarter century the United States has had a sensible monetary policy, which carefully balances the twin goals of price stability and full employment. But we are in great fear of ideologues on a future Federal Reserve Board who will take natural rate theory as more than a useful parable, consider it their duty to define price stability as zero inflation, and see no great cost in achieving it. It would take only a handful of believers in this theory—which is only partially right—to bring about the “Great United States Slump.”

His field was labor economics. He wrote the influential book The Economics of Trade Unions.1 In 1966 he left Chicago for Princeton, and shortly thereafter he began taking on increasing administrative responsibilities. He was eventually tapped by President Gerald Ford to be the director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability. He later returned to Princeton, where he became provost, and finally he served as president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Shortly before his death, Rees wrote a paper for a conference in honor of his old friend Jacob Mincer, also a distinguished labor economist of the Chicago School. (Rees himself had been honored by a similar conference three years earlier.)

Therefore to neutralize the 0.75% cost increase to the firms, unemployment must rise by 1.5 percentage points.10 The Long Term If correct, natural rate theory has major consequences for monetary policy. If it is correct, there is little loss from very low inflation targets. Long-term price stability, with an inflation target of zero, can be achieved with no permanent ill consequences. On the average, over a long period of time unemployment will be unaffected by the choice of inflation target. If, on the other hand, natural rate theory is not true, so that there is a long-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment, a zero inflation target is poor economic policy.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

This approach, popularized by the economist Steven Levitt, has been used to shed light on diverse social phenomena, ranging from the practices of sumo wrestlers to cheating by public school teachers, using careful empirical analysis and incentive-based reasoning.2 Some critics suggest that this line of work trivializes economics. It eschews the big questions of the field—when do markets work and fail, what makes economies grow, how can full employment and price stability be reconciled, and so on—in favor of mundane, everyday applications. In this book I focus squarely on these bigger questions and how economic models help us answer them. We cannot look to economics for universal explanations or prescriptions that apply regardless of context. The possibilities of social life are too diverse to be squeezed into unique frameworks.

The inability of today’s self to commit to the desirable pattern of behavior harms the future self. The generic solution to these problems is a strategy of precommitment. In the inflation example, the policy maker might choose to delegate monetary policy to an independent central bank that is tasked with price stability alone or is run by an ultraconservative banker. In the saving example, someone might ask an employer to make automatic deductions to a retirement plan. The paradox in these cases is that reducing one’s freedom of action can make one better off, defying the usual economic dictum that more choice is always better than less.

What made the “new classical approach,” as it came to be called, a winner—at least in academia—was not its empirical validation. The real-world fit of the model was heavily contested, as was the realism of some of the key ingredients. But shortly after the arrival of the new theory, in the mid-1980s the US economy entered a period of economic growth, full employment, and price stability. The business cycle looked to be conquered in this era of “great moderation.” As a result, the descriptive and predictive realism of the new classical approach seemed, from a practical perspective, not to matter a whole lot. The great appeal of the theory lay in the model itself. The microfoundations, the math, the new techniques, the close links to game theory, econometrics, and other highly regarded fields within economics—all these made the new macroeconomics appear light-years ahead of Keynesian models.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

There have been a huge number of financial crises, including the 2008 global financial crisis, destroying the lives of many through personal indebtedness, bankruptcy and unemployment. An excessive focus on inflation has distracted our attention away from issues of full employment and economic growth. Employment has been made more unstable in the name of ‘labour market flexibility’, destabilizing many people’s lives. Despite the assertion that price stability is the precondition of growth, the policies that were intended to bring lower inflation have produced only anaemic growth since the 1990s, when inflation is supposed to have finally been tamed. That’s where the money is – or is it? In January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr region of Germany, known for its coal and steel.

For example, according to a 1999 study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the British social reform charity named after the famous Quaker philanthropist businessman, nearly two-thirds of British workers said they had experienced an increase in the speed or the intensity of work over the preceding five-year period. Last but not least, in many (although not all) rich countries, the welfare state has been cut back since the 1980s, so people feel more insecure, even if the objective probability of job loss is the same. The point is that price stability is only one of the indicators of economic stability. In fact, for most people, it is not even the most important indicator. The most destabilizing events in most people’s lives are things like losing a job (or having it radically redefined) or having their houses repossessed in a financial crisis, and not rising prices, unless they are of a hyperinflationary magnitude (hand on heart, can you really tell the difference between a 4 per cent inflation and a 2 per cent one?).

The most destabilizing events in most people’s lives are things like losing a job (or having it radically redefined) or having their houses repossessed in a financial crisis, and not rising prices, unless they are of a hyperinflationary magnitude (hand on heart, can you really tell the difference between a 4 per cent inflation and a 2 per cent one?). This is why taming inflation has not quite brought to most people the sense of stability that the anti-inflationary warriors had said it would. Now, the coexistence of price stability (that is, low inflation) and the increase in non-price forms of economic instability, such as more frequent banking crises and greater job insecurity, is not a coincidence. All of them are the results of the same free-market policy package. In the study cited above, Rogoff and Reinhart point out that the share of countries in banking crises is very closely related to the degree of international capital mobility.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

But if the authorities tried to take persistent advantage of that, in order to lower unemployment below the NRU, the result could only be to cause an ever-increasing rate of inflation. This concept, of a vertical long-run Phillips curve, was an important buttress for the subsequent move to Central Bank independence, with a mandate to concentrate on price stability via an inflation target. With such a Phillips curve, Central Bank measures to maintain price stability would not of themselves affect longer-run employment, growth or productivity, which were (in the long term) determined by supply-side factors, not by monetary, short-term demand-side policies.3 Thus, concentration on the control of inflation, via monetary policies, would be of itself beneficial, with no offsetting disadvantages.

The over-riding concern, when Keynes was writing the General Theory, was to restore and to maintain reasonably full employment, not to control inflation. It is in some ways a measure of the success of Keynesian economics that since World War II, at least until the twenty-first century, the main problem that faced us was to combine reasonably full employment with price stability. Of course, the initial recovery to full employment at the end of the 1930s and early 1940s owed more to rearmament and World War II than to Keynesian economics. But after World War II and into the early 1950s, the initial major concern/expectation was that the advanced economies might fall back into a further bout of stagnation/deflation.

Globalisation has been checked by populism, just at the time that demographic factors are swinging back to labour’s advantage. Meanwhile, those who extrapolate the recent past into the future, ignoring longer-run forces, are asserting that we will remain in secular stagnation. The slow-moving pendulum is about to swing back again. It may be that, for a year or two, we could combine even lower unemployment with price stability, but that will not last. The message of this chapter is that, not only is the long-run Phillips curve vertical at the NRU (u*), but also the position of u* is continuously and systematically shifting owing to longer-run demographic, political and economic forces. You ignore such trends at your peril.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

The fear of the German negotiators was that if banking supervision was elevated to the level of the Union then problems in the banking system would also be dealt with by the center. Given the small size of the Commission’s budget, this would likely imply a need for the European Central Bank (ECB) to provide support for troubled banks. Such responsibilities would be a distraction from the bank’s central objective of maintaining price stability and would encourage political lobbying about its decisions. To avoid this risk, Karl Otto Pöhl, President of the Bundesbank, pushed strongly for national supervision in the Delors Committee. By contrast, the British, who were generally the most skeptical of any move toward federation and obtained an opt-out from the single currency, were sympathetic to a Union-wide regulator.

In addition to rehashing old French concerns that weaker currencies were being forced to adjust even when they were not necessarily the source of any strains, the memorandum added a new twist by arguing that the liberalization of capital markets required a zone with a single currency, managed by a common central bank. The Balladur initiative created confusion in the German government. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the “febrile” West German Foreign Minister, presented his own memorandum which emphasized the need for an independent European Central Bank pledged to price stability but without the traditional German emphasis on political and economic convergence.20 Finance Minister Stoltenberg responded with a more traditional plan that focused on the need for political union, while the Bundesbank argued that any plans for a future monetary union be channeled through the central banks themselves via the Council of Governors.

The Committee’s arrangements allowed agreement on two major sticking points in the Economist/Monetarist debate, the relationship of the central bank to political authorities and fiscal policy arrangements. On the former, the crucial moment was the decision by Governor de Larosière to support an independent central bank focused on price stability. Given the importance of this deviation from the typical French policy, he discussed this at a one-on-one meeting with President Mitterrand. According to his own account, he explained that if France wanted agreement with the Germans, we had to accept that monetary policy would be a single policy and that national central banks would be members of a system of central banks where all would have to be independent of governments.


pages: 438 words: 109,306

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World by Adam Lebor

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute cuisine, IBM and the Holocaust, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, special drawing rights

As the most powerful central bank in Europe, the Bundesbank was extremely influential in the design of the ECB. The Bundesbank ensured that the ECB’s “primary objective,” as the ECB notes on its website, is to “maintain price stability” with inflation rates below 2 percent.11 (The Federal Reserve, in contrast, has a dual mandate of combating unemployment and inflation.) “The Germans take a very narrow view of the proper role of central banks, that it is to do almost exclusively with the preservation of price stability,” said William White. “That comes from their history and experience of hyperinflation.”12 To whom then is the ECB democratically accountable? In effect, nobody.

There would be sanctions against countries that exceeded a budget deficit threshold (currently three percent). Crucially, the sanctions would apply not just to members of the future Eurozone, but to all European Union member states. The report called for European countries to take substantial steps toward economic convergence, budgetary discipline, and price stability, before moving decisively toward economic and monetary union. However it was unclear how this strict, common financial discipline would be imposed. A common monetary policy, based on a shared currency, demanded a common fiscal policy with shared rules for government taxation and spending, Lamfalussy argued in a memo in January 1989, but there were no plans for this: In short, it would seem to me very strange if we did not insist on the need to make appropriate arrangements that would allow the gradual emergence, and the full operation once the EMU is completed, of a Community-wide macroeconomic fiscal policy which would be the natural complement to the common monetary policy of the Community.15 As Harold James notes, Lamfalussy’s memo was both “apposite and intellectually compelling.”16 It neatly summarized the contradiction of a transnational currency with no transnational fiscal policy—a contradiction that remains unresolved and has both triggered and fueled the Eurozone crisis.

The Delors Report’s recommendations that the European Union should adopt a single currency and a unified monetary policy were accepted. The momentum toward monetary, economic, and political union was unstoppable. A new bank, the most powerful institution within the ESCB, would be created to define and implement monetary policy. The European Central Bank’s primary task would be to ensure price stability while remaining free of all political pressures. It sounded all too familiar. PART THREE: MELTDOWN CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE SECOND TOWER “European economic unity will come, for its time is here.” — Walther Funk, 19421 The Reichsbank president and BIS director was half right. European economic unity did indeed arrive, but it came sixty years after he predicted.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

Some foreign central banks — including the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan — are given one and only one explicit goal: price stability. The Fed, in contrast to most other central bankers, was instructed by Congress in 1977 to aim at both “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” Democrats in Congress warned Bernanke against any unilateral move to alter the Fed’s priorities, an admonition that Bernanke, like Greenspan before him, countered by maintaining that price stability was the road to maximizing employment and economic growth. Bernanke was not the first Fed chairman to consider inflation targets.

To that end, Bernanke thought the Fed should be more explicit and open about its objectives and thinking than it had been in Greenspan’s time. “The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue — even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been,” Bernanke wrote long before coming to Washington. He imagined a day when the Fed was so easy to understand and so open about its objectives and current views of the economy that a few words from the chairman at a congressional hearing or after-dinner speech wouldn’t move markets because they wouldn’t provide any new information.

All Fed officials speak English as a first language; the ECB does business in English, which is a second language for most of its leadership, and then has to translate its decisions into twenty-one other languages. The ECB has the advantage of clarity of mission: its legal mandate is to resist inflation and ensure stable prices. Period. The Fed’s legal mandate is broader and during a crisis more flexible: maximum employment and price stability. Both central banks are designed to be independent. The ECB’s independence is enshrined in a treaty, but it gets frequent, often hostile, public advice from European heads of state and finance ministers about what it should be doing with interest rates and whether it should be trying to talk the euro down to help European exports.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

At a time when numerous European countries were in what can only be called a depression, the ECB was tightening policy. Asked at his April press conference if the action would increase the stress on the peripheral countries, Trichet was almost dismissive. “I will only say that we are responsible for ensuring price stability for 331 million people, and all the decisions that we have taken since the very beginning of the euro, including today’s, have been designed to deliver price stability to 331 million people.” Sorry, Spain, you’re out of luck. In hindsight, those rate hikes in the spring and summer of 2011 might seem to be among the biggest monetary policy mistakes of the modern age. But when regarded in relation to Trichet’s negotiating strategy, both within the ECB Governing Council and with other European leaders, they look somewhat better.

This creates a conflict of interest between countries with weak economies and populist governments—read Italy, or Spain, or anyway someone from Europe’s slovenly south—and those with strong economies and a steely-eyed commitment to disciplined economic policy—read Germany. The weak economies want low interest rates, and wouldn’t mind a bit of inflation; but Germany is dead set on maintaining price stability at all cost. Nor can Europe deal with “asymmetric shocks” the way the United States does, by transferring workers from depressed areas to prosperous ones. . . . The result is a ferocious political argument, and perhaps a financial crisis, as markets start to discount the bonds of weaker European governments.

But by the middle of 2010, fuel prices weren’t the problem. There were now enough jobless workers that few Americans were getting wage increases. And there were so many idle factories and empty office buildings that companies had room to expand without pushing up prices. Fed officials had years earlier agreed that “price stability” means that consumer prices rise around 2 percent a year. In the twelve months ended in June 2010, the consumer price index rose only 1.1 percent, and even less than that when the volatile food and energy categories were excluded. Perhaps more worrisome, investors and other economic decision makers were starting to conclude that very low inflation would be the new normal.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

The District Bank presidents occupy one stratum of the FOMC, with the Board of Governors one layer above. The FOMC’s vice chair, always the president of the New York Fed, is second-in-command. At the peak of the pyramid reigns the Fed chairman. By law—according to the 1977 amendment of the Federal Reserve Act—the FOMC has two mandates: maintain “price stability” and maximize employment. In other words, safeguard what a greenback can buy while employing as much of the population as possible. Its tools are short-term interest rates and the money supply. When I joined the Fed, the mystique was mesmerizing. No other institution in the world had such power, such prestige.

She described herself as a “non-ideological pragmatist,” and expressed her confidence in the positive contribution that “a predictable, well-executed monetary policy can make to economic growth.” She gave a succinct summary of her views of the Fed’s purpose in 1995, when the Fed was debating proposed legislation that would make price stability the central bank’s sole mandate at the expense of unemployment. “Who would be prepared to believe that the FOMC is single-mindedly going to pursue an inflation target regardless of real economic performance, if not even the Bundesbank is prepared to go that far?” she said, citing the German central bank’s efforts to minimize economic downturns.

Eastern Standard Time, the Fed issues a press release with ten to twelve sentences explaining any changes it had made to the fed funds rate, who voted for and against the move and why, and a short statement about economic news that led to its decision. Throughout the crisis, it almost always included the promise that “the Committee will continue to monitor economic and financial developments and will act as needed to promote sustainable economic growth and price stability.” In Dallas, the statement was released at 1 P.M. I would run up the staircase to the break room television so I could watch as a reporter on CNBC read the statement and see how the markets reacted. I was usually the only person watching. As the crisis descended, the FOMC statement release became a highly anticipated moment for financial markets—and the pistol fired at the start of a race.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

In the second half of the twentieth century, both debtors and creditors could more happily live side-by-side thanks to persistently rising living standards. Rising incomes gave at least some creditors a reasonable return – banks and bondholders both did incredibly well as the inflationary 1970s gave way to the price stability of the 1980s and beyond – while debtors could sleep easily, knowing that higher living standards would easily allow them to pay off their debts, with both interest and little financial pain. Without growth, however, the relationship between creditors and debtors becomes a lot more problematic.

Germany, thinking ahead to the creation of a new monetary system, wanted its reparations in gold, taking its lead from British developments earlier in the nineteenth century. During the Napoleonic Wars, the value of paper British money had declined rapidly: it was the early nineteenth-century equivalent of abandoning a commitment to price stability and allowing inflation to surge. After the Congress of Vienna, however, Britain moved to a gold standard. By that stage, with war no longer an excuse, holders of government bonds were unwilling to accept the inflationary losses attached to their savings and the City of London was not prepared to tolerate the instability associated with high and variable inflation rates.

It is also possible, however, to end up with unintentional inflation. Few, for example, thought inflation was likely to accelerate at the end of the 1960s and certainly policy-makers themselves didn't plan an inflationary pick-up, yet that is exactly what transpired: across the developed world, two decades of price stability were followed by the inflationary upheavals of the 1970s. Could inflation return in current conditions? It seems unlikely. Even as central banks have attempted to reinvigorate economies through quantitative easing, inflation has mostly remained relatively well-behaved. Where it has picked up – most obviously in the UK following sterling's devaluation at the end of 2008 – it has been of a very unusual kind: prices have risen but wages have not followed suit.


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

., (1964). Banks of the World: A History and Analysis. Paris: viii 39 Davies (2002). op .cit. p. 50 40 Innes, A.M., (1913). What is Money? Banking Law and Journal May: 377-408 41 Davies (2002). op. cit., p. 663 42 Wray, L. R., (1998). Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability, Chapter 3. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar p. 43 43 Grierson, P., (1977). The Origins of Money, London: Athlone Press, pp. 19-21 44 Wikipedia (n.d.) Retrievable from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wergeld 45 Greirson (1977). op. cit. p. 43 46 Innes (1913). op. cit. 47 Wray (1998). op. cit. Chapter 3 48 Innes (1913). op. cit. p. 398 49 Mosler, W., (2010).

p=175 and http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/07/05/quantitative-easing-a-wasted-opportunity 26 Peston, R., (n. d.). How Credit Easing Works, BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17437484 27 Graeber, D., (2011). Debt: The First 5000 years, Melville House Publishing: Brooklyn, New York 28 Wray, R., (1998). Understanding Modern Money: The Key to full-employment and price stability, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 29 Innes, A. M., (1913). What is Money, Banking Law Journal (May 1913): 377-08. 30 Carruthers, B. G. and Babb, S., (1996). The Colour of Money and the Nature of Value: Greenbacks and Gold in Postbellum America, American Journal of Sociology, 1010:1556-91 31 Davies, G., (2002).

International Review of Financial Analysis (In Press). Withers, H., (1909). The Meaning of Money. London: Smith and Elder World Bank, (1993). The East Asian Miracle, Economic Growth and Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press Wray, L. R., (1998). Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar ABOUT THE AUTHORS Josh Ryan-Collins is a Senior Researcher at nef (the new economics foundation) where he is leading a programme of research on the history and practice of monetary systems. He is studying for a PhD in finance at the University of Southampton. Tony Greenham is Head of Finance and Business at nef.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

By contrast, the price of gasoline dropped and rose by no more than 12 percent in dollar terms over the same period. Extrapolating from the three-part textbook definition of “money” that we referenced in chapter 2, a currency must exhibit price stability if it is to function properly as a medium of exchange—in addition to proving itself a reliable store of value and an accepted unit of account. It’s hard to suggest that bitcoin now has anywhere near the price stability that’s needed. That’s a direct result of its fluctuation versus other currencies. In an extensive study of bitcoin’s price performance against various other currencies and assets, New York University professor David Yermack concluded that bitcoin is much better viewed as a commodity than as a currency.

In placing these short-term bets, traders provide much-needed “liquidity” to markets—defined as the degree to which investors can easily find buyers of an asset they want to sell or sellers of one they want to buy. As more traders enter the market, creating more prospective buyers and sellers, liquidity increases and prices stabilize. Ironically, though, it’s the volatility, not price gains, that first draws traders in, since that’s what creates profits. If prices are swinging around, traders can make more money being on either side of the trade. We saw this in the 1970s, when the collapse of the Bretton Woods system sent exchange rates haywire and banks rushed to set up highly profitable foreign-exchange trading desks.

Gox emerged, this time compelling it to suspend trading for two days on April 11, which then morphed into bigger legal problems. The bitcoin price plunged to $68 on April 16, where it seemed to find a floor, even though a month later the U.S. government froze Mt. Gox’s U.S. bank account in one of the first signs that Washington wanted to regulate this lawless, new digital currency. Throughout the summer, the price stabilized, sort of, oscillating within “only” a range of $65 to $130. Then U.S. law enforcement first arrived on the cryptocurrency scene. In late June 2013, reports emerged that the FBI had seized 11 bitcoins (then worth $800) from a drug dealer in what was seen as an initial “honeypot sting” on Silk Road.


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

Because banks now had more reserves than they required, the need to borrow reserves on the interbank market was greatly diminished. Consequently, the overnight interbank lending rate now closely mirrors the policy rate. Controlling money creation through interest rates Currently, one of the Bank of England’s two core purposes is to maintain price stability, which in practice means keeping inflation at a target level of 2% a year. It does this by manipulating the short term interest rates at which banks lend reserves to each other on the interbank market. In this section we discuss how the central bank attempts to control inflation through interest rates, the transmission mechanisms from interest rates to inflation, and the effectiveness of the interest rate as a tool to limit the growth in money creation by banks.

Moreover, if savers and borrowers have different consumption patterns then the effect of increasing rates will be to increase the demand for the goods that interest earners buy, pushing up their prices. (Tymoigne, 2009) Fifth, the control of inflation by interest rates can place the two core central bank functions into conflict with each other, namely price stability and financial stability. For example, if asset price inflation is high, then it will take a large increase in the interest rate (above the rate of asset price inflation) in order to stem the rise in credit creation for asset purchase and burst the bubble. This is likely to create strong disruptive effects on the productive economy (possibly bankrupting firms).

Alternatively, the MCC may lend money to the banks to on-lend into the ‘real’ economy, in which case the decision over where the money is lent will be made, within broad guidelines, by the banks. 7.2 Deciding how much money to create: The Money Creation Committee (MCC) The decision over how much new money to create would be given to an independent body, to be known as the Monetary Creation Committee. As is the case today, the target of monetary policy will be the rate of inflation. However, in line with democratic principles, if Parliament deems targets other than price stability to be more desirable, it will have the ability to change the MCC’s mandate. In deciding the amount of money that would be added or removed from circulation, the MCC would broadly aim to change the growth rate of the money supply in order to keep inflation at around the 2% a year target. Creation of new money by the MCC will increase the amount of spending in the economy.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

In this setting, and in one of the more dramatic experiments in recent monetary history, the Ecuadoran government decided, in January of 2000, to adopt, de facto, unilaterally, and apparently without much external consultation, the U.S. dollar as its national currency. This was a “policy of last resort,” an almost desperate move to restore some degree of monetary and price stability in a country that needed an urgent monetary anchor to stabilize expectations, avoid hyperinflation, stop uncontrolled currency depreciation, and enable resumption of normal economic and financial activity. Official dollarization had a political motivation as well. In late 1999, constitutionally elected President Mahuad was facing a sharp plunge in his popularity.

The processes by which annual budgets are formulated, considered by the Congress, codified into a payments calendar, adjusted over the course of budget exercise for unforeseen events, and finally executed have various shortcomings. These arise in part from the practical difficulty of planning properly in an unstable context; institutional complexities in the planning and implementation phases; and long-standing problems in the processing of information. Once dollarization brings about price stability, the need to alter the budget in mid-year for unanticipated events should diminish. Since the mid-1990s, with World Bank support, the government has been developing and implementing a modern, computerized management information system. The system was officially inaugurated for a core group of public entities in May 2000, and implementation has been proceeding since then.

Lessons from Panama’s Dollarization Panama adopted the dollar following its independence in 1904.3 Unlike many other Latin American economies, where debilitating cycles of inflation, exchange-rate depreciation, adjustment, and recession have hampered growth and intensified social conflict, Panama has maintained monetary and price stability and steady growth. Panamanian business has never experienced or ever had to cope with the fear of exchange-rate depreciation. In recent years, inflation rates in Panama have actually been below those of the United States. Although Panama has coped with external-debt problems and exogenous shocks, it has avoided traumatic balance-of-payments crises, as well as systemic banking or financial crises.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Since no one can produce gold at will (with only small amounts being mined every year), this Gold Standard system seemed to guarantee a stable, almost constant, supply of money in each participating country. Despite many hiccups, especially during the First World War, during which it was suspended, the Gold Standard seemed to deliver the intended price stability. Indeed, inflation was kept at bay, even if we now know that this price stability was bought at the cost of lower growth and employment. Then the Crash of 1929 struck at a time when, because of the Gold Standard, governments’ hands were tied. Banks were failing, businesses were collapsing, workers were being laid off in droves, tax takes were falling fast, but the government could not create more money to help either labour or capital weather the storm.

In a recent BBC interview, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s then managing director, called for a return to Keynes’ original idea as the only solution to the troubles of the post-2008 world economy.3 But what was the nub of the proposal? It was to bring on the benefits of a common currency (trade facilitation and convenience, price stability, predictability in international trading) without suffering the main demerits that come when disparate economies are monetarily bound together. The lost opportunity The problem with currency unions, as Argentina was to discover in the late 1990s and Europe in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008, is the simple fact of life that trade and capital flows can remain systematically unbalanced for decades, if not centuries.

The missing mechanism Global capitalism cannot be stabilised on the basis of more investment, better gadgets, faster railways, smarter innovations. This is the error of vulgar Keynesians who think that if only the state spent and invested wisely, all would be well. Similarly, global capitalism will not regain its lost poise if central banks focus on price stability, and the task of rebalancing the world economy is left to the magical machinations of supply and demand. This is the even more menacing error of libertarians. The stability of global, but also regional, capitalism requires a global surplus recycling mechanism – a mechanism that markets, however globalised, free and well-functioning they might be, cannot provide.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

But as unemployment came down to 4 percent in 1999 (its lowest level in three decades), the Fed’s anti-inflation priority was temporarily reasserted, even in a context of price stability, and interest rates were raised six times by the first quarter of 2000. This was undertaken against opposition from a minority on the FOMC who argued that concerns a tight labor market would inevitably lead to inflation were, as the New York Federal Reserve’s William McDonough put it, “a fiction of our own minds,” and that it would be taken as evidence that “what we believe in is not price stability but a differentiation in income distribution that goes against the working people.”14 With the collapse in the NASDAQ high-tech stock index in March 2000, signaling the end of the dot.com bubble and the possibility of a recession, the Fed reversed course again and adopted a very loose monetary policy that continued through 9/11 and the Argentine financial crisis, bringing interest rates down from 6 to 2 percent in the course of 2001.

More broadly their concerns related to their ambition to replace London as the world’s international financial center.48 But above all Wall Street’s opposition reflected the concern that New Deal–type economists and technicians ensconced in permanent international institutions might have even greater autonomy from them than those in the Federal Reserve and the Treasury (especially since the Treasury clearly wanted the Fund to displace the Bank of International Settlements, which had been created by the bankers themselves).49 Moreover, given the Keynesian provenance of the Fund and the Bank, it was hardly surprising that bankers would be anxious lest full employment rather than price stability might become the priority for governments. Their anxiety about the inflationary implications of full employment was by no means an idle concern, and would indeed prove to be—as Michal Kalecki and Joan Robinson also predicted at the time—the central contradiction of Keynesianism in the postwar era.

The achievement of near full employment within all the advanced capitalist states spurred the growing militancy of a new generation of workers who drove up wages, challenged managerial prerogatives, and forced a steady increase in social expenditures—all of which not only made it very difficult for capitalist states to resolve international economic imbalances through domestic austerity policies, but generated growing worries about price stability, productivity and profits. Because this was not a zero-sum game, and capital was also strong by virtue of its having been restored to health so effectively, the contradiction became intense amid rising inflation and class conflicts. Moreover, alongside this new balance of class forces in the advanced capitalist countries, the success of postwar decolonization of the old empires, so much encouraged by the new American empire, stoked the rise of economic nationalism in the “Third World” that challenged the international norms for the mutual interstate protection of capitalist property.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

For more information about this title, click here C O N T E N T S Foreword xv Preface xvii Acknowledgments xxi PART 1 THE VERDICT OF HISTORY Chapter 1 Stock and Bond Returns Since 1802 3 “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” 3 Financial Market Returns from 1802 5 The Long-Term Performance of Bonds 7 The End of the Gold Standard and Price Stability 9 Total Real Returns 11 Interpretation of Returns 12 Long-Term Returns 12 Short-Term Returns and Volatility 14 Real Returns on Fixed-Income Assets 14 The Fall in Fixed-Income Returns 15 The Equity Premium 16 Worldwide Equity and Bond Returns: Global Stocks for the Long Run 18 Conclusion: Stocks for the Long Run 20 Appendix 1: Stocks from 1802 to 1870 21 Appendix 2: Arithmetic and Geometric Returns 22 v vi Chapter 2 Risk, Return, and Portfolio Allocation: Why Stocks Are Less Risky Than Bonds in the Long Run 23 Measuring Risk and Return 23 Risk and Holding Period 24 Investor Returns from Market Peaks 27 Standard Measures of Risk 28 Varying Correlation between Stock and Bond Returns 30 Efficient Frontiers 32 Recommended Portfolio Allocations 34 Inflation-Indexed Bonds 35 Conclusion 36 Chapter 3 Stock Indexes: Proxies for the Market 37 Market Averages 37 The Dow Jones Averages 38 Computation of the Dow Index 39 Long-Term Trends in the Dow Jones 40 Beware the Use of Trend Lines to Predict Future Returns 41 Value-Weighted Indexes 42 Standard & Poor’s Index 42 Nasdaq Index 43 Other Stock Indexes: The Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) 45 Return Biases in Stock Indexes 46 Appendix: What Happened to the Original 12 Dow Industrials?

Finally, by 1982, the restrictive monetary policy of Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve System since 1979, brought inflation and interest rates down to more moderate levels. One can see that the level of interest rates is closely tied to the level of inflation. Understanding the returns on fixed-income assets therefore requires knowledge of how inflation is determined. THE END OF THE GOLD STANDARD AND PRICE STABILITY Consumer prices in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past 200 years are depicted in Figure 1-3. In each country, the price level at the end of World War II was essentially the same as it was 150 years earlier. But after World War II, the nature of inflation changed dramatically.

As described in detail in Chapter 11, a gold standard restricts the supply of money and hence the inflation rate. But from the Great Depression through World War II, the world shifted to a paper money standard. Under a paper money standard there is no legal constraint on the issuance of money, so inflation is subject to political as well as economic forces. Price stability depends on the ability of the central banks to limit the growth of the supply of money in order to counteract deficit spending and other inflationary policies implemented by the federal government. The chronic inflation that the United States and other developed economies have experienced since World War II does not mean that the gold standard was superior to the current paper money standard.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

If a politician suggested a numerical target for reducing unemployment, he would be committing treason in the war against inflation. A central banker would rather tie himself in verbal knots than admit that policies on interest rates might help create jobs. Today, inflation is the only macroeconomic variable for which governments set public targets. And central bankers focus on the sole objective of price stability in every speech. If central bankers can control inflation, states the official orthodoxy, then jobs, prosperity, and everything else will take care of itself, or more precisely, will be managed satisfactorily by market forces. To the extent that central bankers and finance ministers do care about jobs and economic growth, these concerns now have to be repackaged and disguised as arguments about long-term inflationary prospects.

Ben Bernanke, in his speech about the Great Moderation in 2004, still felt obliged to pay lip service to the official doctrine that maintaining low inflation had been the key to the Fed’s success in stabilizing employment and economic growth. The truth, however, was that the Fed and other central banks gradually returned to the broad economic philosophies, if not the exact policies, abandoned in the 1970s. These policies were again directed, as they had been in the 1950s and 1960s, to achieving a reasonable balance between price stability, full employment, and steady growth. And for most of the twenty-year period after demand management was reinvented, the central bankers were remarkably successful in walking the tightrope between inflation and unemployment. Their success lasted right up until the autumn of 2008, when the Lehman crisis blew up the tightrope, the safety net, and most of the spectators in the circus tent.

The single-minded focus on inflation held even though central bankers always understood that the relationship between money and inflation was much more subtle than official slogans proclaimed. With demand management neutered by the predominant monetarist economic doctrine, only one reasonable criterion for judging the success of macroeconomic policy seemed to remain: price stability. All the other goals of macroeconomic management that had dominated democratic politics from the 1930s until the late 1970s—achieving full employment, maximizing output growth, and keeping trade and government budgets in reasonable balance—were relegated by finance ministers and central bankers to their junior colleagues who controlled the ministries responsible for microeconomic issues such as trade policy, industry, and government budgeting.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

But if trade-offs exist, the people making them need to be politically accountable. In Europe, the governance is even worse than in the United States. Europe pretended that it could get around the problem of governance by giving the ECB a simple mandate—ensuring price stability (also known as fighting inflation). Inevitably, there are going to be judgments about what price stability means (zero inflation or 2 percent or 4 percent), and in making those judgments policymakers will have to consider the consequences of different targets. If pursuing a 2 percent inflation target versus a 4 percent target were to lead to much slower growth, I doubt that many voters would support that target given the chance.

Research in economics over the past half-century has shown that not only is there a presumption that markets are not efficient and stable; it has also explained why that is so and what governments can do to improve societal well-being.33 Today, even market fundamentalists (sometimes also referred to as “neoliberals”) admit that there is a need for government intervention to maintain macro-stability—though they typically argue that government interventions should be limited to a rules-based monetary policy focused on price stability—and to ensure property rights and contract enforcement. Otherwise, regulations and restrictions should be stripped away. There was no economic rationale for this conclusion—it flies in the face of a huge body of economic research showing that there is a need for a wider role for government. The world has paid a high price for this devotion to the religion of market fundamentalism/neoliberalism, and now it’s Europe’s turn.

In this chapter I will describe the structural flaws in the ECB and how these flaws have translated into policy decisions, some of which have worked well, but others of which have weakened the eurozone economy and increased the divides within it. THE INFLATION MANDATE When the ECB was established in 1998 as part of the process that created the euro, it was constructed expressly to limit what it could do. It was given a single, clear mandate: to maintain price stability.2 This is markedly different from the mandate of the US Federal Reserve, which is supposed to not only control inflation but also promote growth and full employment. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the Fed was given a further mandate—maintaining financial stability. It was ironic that this had to be added to the list, for the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 to protect the integrity of the financial system after the panic of 1907.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Keynes theorized the concepts of money and credit and developed a set of applications that flew in the face of Austrian beliefs. As he stated in a 1928 précis, “It must be admitted that advocates of price stability, amongst whom I number myself, have erred in the past when their words have seemed to indicate price stability as the sole objective of monetary policy. . . . To speak or write in this way is to unduly simplify the problem.” The implications of this statement ran counter to the approach to price stability and self-adjusting monetary policy advocated by Mises, Machlup, and Hayek. It directly counteracted many of the ideas advanced in Hayek’s Monetary Theory.25 As could be expected, when Hayek delivered his LSE lectures and then visited Cambridge, he received a chilly welcome.

This usually meant popular interventions in the liberal media and behind-the-scenes advocacy work for government agencies and business groups. In articles written between 1931 and 1934 by a quartet of Austrians (Haberler, Hayek, Machlup, and Morgenstern), they argued against protectionism, exchange controls, and credit injections into the economy. They supported austerity in state expenditures and domestic price stability and deflation. A return to the gold standard and pro-trade policies were frequent suggestions. They believed that price flexibility and deregulated markets in production and employment, too, would spur recovery.21 As this brief sampling of activities demonstrates, the early 1930s were a fertile period for members of the Austrian School.

The planners designed instruments to prevent currencies from drifting from their pegged value, which were enforced by the IMF and IBRD. Tensions arose between the United Kingdom and the United States during negotiations, however. The British favored a system more oriented toward growth and international liquidity; the Americans preferred price stability. The United States ended up dictating most terms, especially with respect to the IMF.73 The Bretton Woods agreement worked reasonably well into the early 1960s, when new concerns surfaced. The United States ran increasing balance of payments deficits, meaning that foreign states and investors held ballooning sums of US debt.


pages: 128 words: 35,958

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

As a practical matter, there is probably no central bank that would place a greater priority on its 2.0 percent inflation target than on preventing the collapse of the financial system, but the stated and often legal commitment of central banks across the globe is to this 2.0 percent target. The European Central Bank has this commitment in its charter, and it is the official target for policy of the Bank of England. The Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke is ostensibly committed to a 2.0 percent inflation target, even though its mandate from Congress requires it to pursue both price stability and high employment.[19] Given the rapid spread of inflation targeting as the basis for central bank policy, it is worth asking where this urge originated. First, note that wealthy countries have generally had inflation rates well above 2.0 percent and still managed to maintain healthy growth rates.

Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 128, No. 2, pp. 581-622. Doucouliagos, Hristos, and T. D. Stanley. 2009. “Publication Selection Bias in Minimum-Wage Research? A Meta-Regression Analysis.” British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 47, No 2, pp. 406-28. Feldstein, Martin. 1997. “The Costs and Benefits of Going From Low Inflation to Price Stability.” In Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer, eds., Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). http://www.nber.org/chapters/c8883.pdf Fischer, Stanley. 1981. “Towards an Understanding of the Costs of Inflation, 2.” In K. Brunner and A. Meltzer, eds. “The Costs and Consequences of Inflation,” Camegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Vol. 15 (Amsterdam: North Holland).


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Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”45 Given the association forged in the 1970s between monetarism and inflation fighting, one could easily confuse Bernanke’s promise with a conventional central banker’s commitment to price stability. Indeed, Bernanke was making a commitment to price stability, but what he was promising to prevent was deflation, not inflation. The lesson of the 1930s was that the Fed must act promptly not just to prevent the money supply expanding excessively but also to prevent bank failures from causing it to implode.46 On Bernanke’s watch there would be no deflation.

The ECB’s constitution provided plenty of safeguards. Its deliberations were shielded from public scrutiny by minimal transparency requirements. To prevent it from being put to work as a vehicle of fiscal policy, it was banned from monetizing newly issued government debt. Unlike the Fed, which had a dual mandate for price stability and maximum employment, the ECB had price stability as its only target. All this made the ECB the most remote of all the modern central banks.26 To call it apolitical would be a misnomer, because it, in fact, entrenched a conservative bias against inflation as the unquestionable doxa of Europe. Nor would it be fair to say that anti-inflation politics were the ECB’s only ambition.

The losses needed either to be pushed down to the investors all across Europe who had profited from the banks’ unsustainable business models or to be raised to the level of a coordinated European bailout. Extend-and-pretend on a national basis merely turned banking crises into fiscal crises, which widened uncertainty while deflecting attention from the real issue. IV In their defense, legalists at the ECB would argue that the central bank’s mandate gave it only one objective, price stability. They could derive from that an obligation to maintain the functioning of Europe’s financial markets and Europe’s banks. And Trichet would thus justify his interference in Greek and Irish affairs and more to come. What the ECB did not have was a mandate to concern itself with the economic welfare of the eurozone or its member states in any broader sense.


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Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed by John Peet, Anton La Guardia, The Economist

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, Doha Development Round, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Money creation, moral hazard, Northern Rock, oil shock, open economy, pension reform, price stability, quantitative easing, special drawing rights, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, éminence grise

The initial system of one vote per council member is to be superseded, most probably during 2015, by an arrangement that will give the executive board six votes, add four votes that rotate among the five biggest euro members and give the rest, no matter how many there are, 11 votes in total (this change creates at least the theoretical possibility that the Bundesbank’s president might not always have a vote on the council). The ECB was modelled on the German Bundesbank but is in many ways even more powerful and independent. Its goal, fixed by the Maastricht treaty, is price stability (close to but below 2%), whereas the Federal Reserve, its American counterpart, is also required to pay attention to employment. Its operational independence in delivering the goal of price stability, which it defines itself, is also guaranteed by the same treaty. Unlike other central banks, it has no single government or finance ministry to interact with and report to, though its president testifies before the European Parliament and attends most meetings of the European Council and often EcoFin and the Eurogroup as well.

., The Passage to Europe, Yale University Press, 2013 Appendix 4 How The Economist saw it at the time May 1st–7th 2010 July 10th–16th 2010 November 20th–26th 2010 December 4th–10th 2010 January 15th–21st 2011 March 12th-18th 2011 June 11th-17th 2011 June 25th-July 1st 2011 October 29th-November 4th 2011 November 5th-11th 2011 November 12th-18th 2011 November 26th-December 2nd 2011 February 18th–24th 2012 March 31st–April 6th 2012 May 19th–25th 2012 May 26th-June 1st 2012 July 28th-August 3rd 2012 August 11th-17th 2012 November 17th-23rd 2012 March 23rd-29th 2013 May 25th–31st 2013 September 14th–20th 2013 October 26th-November 1st 2013 January 4th-10th 2014 Index 1974–75 global recession 10 A accession treaties 112 accountability 125–129, 162 Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) 130–131 Alogoskoufis, George 42 Amsterdam treaty 111–112, 193 Anastasiades, Nicos 2, 86–88 Anglo Irish Bank 53 Ansip, Anders 104 Arab spring 145–146 Argentina 5, 50 Armenia 149 Ashton, Catherine 28, 43, 144 Asmussen, Jörg 51, 82 Austria 111, 127 influence 108 interest rates 93 Azerbaijan 149 Aznar, José Maria 17 B Bagehot, Walter 9 bail-in rules 83, 90–91, 165 see also Cyprus bail-outs national approval requirement 127 no-bail-out rule 45, 162, 163–165 Balkans war 143 Bank of Cyprus 86–87 Bank of England 47, 157 bank recapitalisation 58–59, 74–77, 84 Bankia 72 banking sector characteristics 35 banking supervision see financial supervision banking union 23, 74–75, 77, 83–85, 90–92, 106, 165, 195 see also deposit guarantees; financial supervision Barnier, Michel 41, 138 Barroso, José Manuel early days of crisis 41 European Commission 97, 98, 141, 172 Greece 3, 78 Italy 63 Batista, Paulo Nogueira 46 Belarus 149 Belgium 17, 100, 127 Berlusconi, Silvio euro currency view 151 Italy’s failure to reform 59, 60, 62–63 People of Freedom party (PdL) 107 resignation 64 Black Wednesday 16–17 Blair, Tony 28, 112 BNP Paribas 40 Bolkestein directive 137 bond yields 37, 38, 61, 70, 89 bond spreads 37, 42, 70, 80, 88 Bootle, Roger 1 Bowles, Sharon 98, 129 Brandt, Willy 10 Bretton Woods 9–10 Brown, Gordon 24, 41, 48, 102, 112, 144 Bruegel think-tank 35, 74, 163, 166 budget deficits Maastricht ceiling 15 timescales for meeting targets 88–89 see also stability and growth pact budgets annual, European 21, 27, 118 central 13, 168–170 federal 164, 168 fiscal capacity 84 Bulgaria 108, 113, 124, 126, 147 Bundesbank 16, 23, 157 C Cameron, David 14, 17, 64–65, 117–119, 132, 140 Cannes G20 summit (2011) 62–64 Capital Economics 1 Cassis de Dijon judgment 21 Catalonia 178 CEBS (Committee of European Banking Supervisors) 35 central banks, national 22–23 Centre for European Policy Studies 34 Centre for European Reform 34 CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) 142, 144 China 33, 139, 167 Chirac, Jacques 18, 23, 100, 127 Christofias, Demetris 86 Churchill, Winston 7, 115, 161 Clark, Christopher 178 climate change 135–136 Clinton, Hillary 144 Cockfield, Arthur 13 Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) 35 Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) 20 Committee of Regions 21 common fisheries policy 100, 138 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 142, 144 community method 19, 21–22 Competitiveness Pact see Euro Plus Pact complacency pre-crisis 36–37 Constâncio, Vítor 34 constitution proposals 26–27 convergence criteria 14–16, 41, 112, 193 COREPER (Committee of Permanent Representatives) 20 COSAC (Conference of Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments of the European Union) 133 Council of Ministers 20, 121, 130 Council of the European Union see Council of Ministers Court of Auditors 21 Court of First Instance 21 Crafts, Nicholas 9 credit ratings (countries) 69, 77–78, 108 Crimea 150 Croatia 113, 143, 147 current-account (im)balances 25, 31, 88–89, 167–168 customs union, German 9 Cyprus accession 147 bail-out 2, 85–88 entry to euro 112 finances pre-crisis 30 Cyprus Popular Bank (Laiki) 86–88 Czech Republic 113, 118 D Dayton agreement 143 de Gaulle, Charles 9, 22, 96 de Larosière, Jacques 41, 74 Deauville meeting between Sarkozy and Merkel 51–52, 102 debt mutualisation 74, 103, 166–167 defence and security 8, 143, 145 deflation 92 Delors, Jacques 11, 37, 97 Delpla, Jacques 167 democratic accountability 125–129, 162 democratic deficit 121, 129–132, 162–163, 171–172 Denmark European participation 112 justice and home affairs (JHA) 111, 139 ministerial accountability 133 opt-outs 139 referendums 16, 27, 132 shadowing of euro 113 single currency opt-out 110, 115 UK sympathies 119 deposit guarantees 5, 40–41, 74, 77, 91 Deutschmark 10, 12, 16 devaluation, internal 31, 65–66 Dexia 72 Dijsselbloem, Jeroen 24, 87 double majority voting 20, 114 Draghi, Mario 156 appointment as ECB president 23, 68 crisis-management team 2 demand for fiscal compact 64 Long Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO) 68–70 outright monetary transactions (OMT) 78–81 pressure on Berlusconi 59 “whatever it takes” London speech 79 Duisenberg, Wim 23 E e-commerce 137 east–west divide 108 ECB (European Central Bank) bond-buying 47–49, 59–60 crisis-management planning 2, 4 delays 156 European System of Central Banks 22 liquidity provision 40–42, 68–70 outright monetary transactions (OMT) 79–81, 164, 175–176 role and function 22–24, 39–40, 170–171 supervision 6, 99, 175, 195 troika membership 160–161 EcoFin meetings 20, 114 Economic and Financial Committee 20 economic and monetary union (EMU) 11, 112 Economic and Social Committee 21 economic imbalances 30–34 The Economist on ECB responsibilities 15 fictitious memorandum to Angela Merkel 1 ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) 7–8 EEAS (European External Action Service) 142, 144 EEC (European Economic Community) 8 EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) 26, 48, 55, 60–61, 81, 194 see also ESM (European Stability Mechanism) EFSM (European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism) 48 Eiffel group 120, 129, 164 elections, European 121, 129–130 Elysée treaty 100 emissions-trading scheme (ETS) 135–136 EMS (European Monetary System) creation of 11 exchange-rate mechanism 16 membership 15 EMU (economic and monetary union) 11, 112 EMU@10 36 energy policies 136 enhanced co-operation 111 enlargement 33, 146–147 environment summits 135 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 148 ESM (European Stability Mechanism) 194 establishment 26, 55, 80–81 operations 58, 75, 76, 91 Estonia 65, 108 ETS (emissions-trading scheme) 135–136 EU 2020 strategy 137 euro break-up contingency plans 2–3 convergence criteria 14–16, 41, 112, 193 crash danger 47–48 introduction of 4, 18 notes and coins 18 special circumstances 3–4 euro crisis effect on world influence 143–146 errors 155–161 focus of attention 135–141 Euro Plus Pact 55, 195 euro zone 4 economic dangers 175–178 increasing significance of institutions 113–114, 120 performance compared with US 154–155 political dangers 175–178 political integration 125 trust 173 Eurobonds 54, 59, 74, 166–167 Eurogroup of finance ministers 24, 114 European Banking Authority 114, 195 European Central Bank (ECB) bond-buying 47–49, 59–60 crisis-management planning 2, 4 delays 156 European System of Central Banks 22 liquidity provision 40–42, 68–70 outright monetary transactions (OMT) 79–81, 164, 175–176 role and function 22–24, 39–40, 170–171 supervision 6, 99, 175, 195 troika membership 160–161 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) 7–8 European Commission commissioners 19, 172 errors 160 future direction 171–172 influence and power 96–97, 99, 119, 125 intrusiveness 127, 140–141 organisation 19 presidency 131, 144 proposals for economic governance 50 European Community 12 European Council 20, 98–99 European Court of Human Rights 21 European Court of Justice 21 European Defence Community 8 European Economic Community (EEC) 8 European External Action Service (EEAS) 142, 144 European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM) 48 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) 26, 48, 55, 60–61, 81, 194 see also European Stability Mechanism (ESM) European Financial Stability Mechanism 26 see also European Stability Mechanism (ESM) European Investment Bank 21 European Monetary Institute 22 European Monetary System (EMS) creation of 11 exchange-rate mechanism 16 membership 15 European Parliament 20–21, 97–98, 99, 100, 119, 121, 129–132, 171 European People’s Party 117, 127, 130–131 European Political Co-operation 142 European semester 25, 195 European Stability Mechanism (ESM) 194 establishment 26, 55, 80–81 operations 58, 75, 76, 91 European Systemic Risk Board 41 European Union driving forces for monetary union 12–13 expansion 26 historical background 7–12 treaty making 26–28 world influence 140, 142–150 European Union Act (2011) 117, 132 Eurosceptics 13, 123 Finns Party 124 Jobbik 125 League of Catholic Families 125 National Front 124 Party of Freedom (PdL) 124 UK Independence Party (UKIP) 118, 125, 140 excessive deficit procedure 24, 88–89, 194, 195 exchange-rate systems 3, 9–11 exchange rates 164 F Farage, Nigel 98, 118 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 77 Federal Reserve (US) 23, 47, 48, 157 federalism 19, 110, 116, 161–165, 168–170, 177–178 financial integration 35–36 financial supervision 195 ECB 6, 99, 175, 195 Jacques de Larosière proposals 41 national 23, 35 single supervisor 76–77, 83–84, 90 Finland accession 26, 111 Finns Party 124 influence 108 ministerial accountability 133 fiscal capacity 84 fiscal compact treaty 25–26, 64–65, 118, 194–195 fiscal policy, focus on 30–31 Five Star Movement 124, 126 fixed exchange-rate systems 3, 9–10 Foot, Michael 116 forecasts, growth 92 foreign policy 142–143 Fouchet plan 22 France credit rating 69, 103 current-account balance 168 EMS exchange-rate mechanism 16 excessive deficit procedure 89 GDP growth 32 and Greece 44 influence 100–104, 142–143 Maastricht deal 12, 16 public debt 159 public opinion of EU 123, 124 single currency views 16–17 unemployment 159 veto of UK entry 115 vote to block European Defence Community 8 freedoms of movement 8, 13 G Gaulle, Charles de 9, 22, 96 Gazprom 136 GDP growth 32 Georgia 149 Germany 2013 elections 90, 106, 125 bond yields 37, 89 Bundesbank 16, 23, 157 constitutional (Karlsruhe) court 45, 95, 128, 158 credit rating 69, 77–78 crisis management errors 155–156 current-account surplus 89, 105, 167–168 demands post Greek bail-out 50–51 economic strengths and weaknesses 14 GDP growth 32 and Greece 44 influence 100–106 Maastricht deal 12, 15–16 national control and accountability 128, 133 parliamentary seats 100 political parties 93, 125 public debt 159 public opinion of EU 123 unemployment 159 unification 16 Zollverein 9 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 11, 18, 26, 100 Glienicker group 163, 170 gold standard 9–10 Golden Dawn 124 government spending (worldwide) 4 governments, insolvency of 50 great moderation 31 Greece 2012 election 73, 126 bail-out deal 45–47, 56–58, 65–67, 70, 158 bond yields 37, 61–62 current-account balance 168 debt crisis 42–45 euro membership 18, 112, 115 finances post bail-out 93–94 finances pre-crisis 30, 71 GDP growth 32 potential euro exit 1–5, 81–83 public debt 159, 166 public opinion of EU and euro 113, 123, 124 referendum on bail-out 2, 61–62 unemployment 159 Gros, Daniel 34 H Hague, William 151 Haider, Jörg 127 Hamilton, Alexander 162, 167 Heath, Edward 10, 116 Heisbourg, François 104 Hollande, François 73–74, 89, 103–104, 127 proposed reforms 177 Hungary 41, 113, 126, 147 Hypo Real Estate 41 I Iceland 53, 147 ideological differences 114–115 IKB Deutsche Industriebank 40 immigration 139–140, 146, 147 impossible trinity 13 inter-governmentalism 96, 128, 174 interest rates 93, 164 internal devaluation 31, 65–66 International Monetary Fund (IMF) banking union 74 crisis-management planning 2, 4–5 Cyprus 86–87 errors 160–161 euro zone support 48 Greece 44–46, 56–57, 66, 83, 93–95, 160 Latvia 65 rainy-day funds 169–170 special drawing rights (SDR) 63 Iraq 143 Ireland 89, 110 bail-out 53–54, 56, 57, 89 bank crises 40, 71 bond yields 37, 47, 53, 61, 89 current-account balance 168 finances pre-crisis 30 GDP growth 32 influence 107 opt-outs 111, 139 public debt 159, 166 public opinion of EU 123 referendums 27, 28, 132 unemployment 159 Italy 2013 elections 107, 124, 126 bond yields 37, 61, 89 convergence criteria 17 current-account balance 168 danger of collapse 59 EMS exchange-rate mechanism 16 excessive deficit procedure 89 GDP growth 32 influence 100, 104, 107 interest rates 93 public debt 159, 166 public opinion of EU 123 single currency views 17 unemployment 159 J Jenkins, Roy 11 Jobbik 125 Juncker, Jean-Claude 98, 104, 177 candidate for Commission Presidency 131 EU 2005 budget crisis 28 Eurobonds 54 Eurogroup president 24 justice and home affairs (JHA) 139 K Karamanlis, Kostas 42 Karlsruhe constitutional court 45, 95, 128, 158 Kauder, Volker 105 Kerry, John 144 Kohl, Helmut 12, 18, 100 L labour markets 14, 33–34 Lagarde, Christine 51, 58, 62, 92 Laiki 86–88 Lamers, Karl 111 Lamont, Norman 17 Larosière, Jacques de 41, 74 Latin Monetary Union 9 Latvia 41, 65, 67, 88, 108 Lawson, Nigel 16 League of Catholic Families 125 legislative path 21–22 Lehman Brothers, ECB reaction to collapse 4 Letta, Enrico 107–108 Libya 143, 145 Lipsky, John 57 Lisbon treaty 28, 45, 194 foreign policy 142 institutions 20, 131 justice and home affairs (JHA) 139 subsidiarity 133 voting 20, 114 Lithuania 88, 113, 153 Long Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO) 68–70, 72 Luxembourg 77–78, 100, 108, 169 Luxembourg compromise 97 M Maastricht treaty 11–12, 15, 22, 142, 193 opt-outs and referendums 16, 110–111 MacDougall report (1977) 13, 169 Major, John 12, 111, 116 Malta 100, 112 Maroni, Roberto 34 Mayer, Thomas 1 McCreevy, Charlie 41 MEPs 20–21, 130 Merkel, Angela 2013 re-election 90 banking union 74–77 Cannes G20 summit (2011) 63–64 crisis response 40–41, 44 European constitution 28 fictitious memorandum to 1 future direction 178 power and influence 89, 102–106, 153 Sarkozy collaboration 60, 61–62, 102–103 support for Cyprus 86 support for Greece 5, 45, 49–52, 81–82 support for UK 118–119 union method 22, 128 voter support 125 Messina conference 8, 115 migration 139–140, 146, 147 Miliband, David 144 Mitterrand, François 11, 12, 18, 100 Mody, Ashoka 163 Moldova 149 Monnet, Jean 8, 152 Montebourg, Arnaud 104 Montenegro 147 Monti, Mario 64 influence 70, 75–76, 107 A New Strategy for the Single Market (2010) 137–138 Morocco 146 Morrison, Herbert 8 Morsi, Muhammad 145 Moscovici, Pierre 75 multi-annual financial framework 21, 27, 118 Mundell, Robert 12–13 mutualisation of debt 74, 103, 166–167 N national budgets 89, 125 National Front 124 NATO defence spending targets 145 European security 8 membership 110 Netherlands credit rating 77–78 excessive deficit procedure 89 influence 100, 108 ministerial accountability 133 UK sympathies 119 Nice treaty 194 no-bail-out rule 45, 162, 163–165 north–south divide 33–34, 108 Northern Rock 40 notes and coins 18 Nouy, Danièle 90 Nuland, Victoria 149 O Obama, Barack 63 official sector involvement (OSI) 83 OMT (outright monetary transactions) 79–81, 164, 175–176 Germany’s constitutional court judgment 95, 128 optimal currency-area theory 12–13, 14–15 Orban, Viktor 126 Osborne, George 117, 119 OSI (official sector involvement) 83 outright monetary transactions (OMT) 79–81, 164, 175–176 Germany’s constitutional court judgment 95, 128 P Pact for the Euro see Euro Plus Pact Papaconstantinou, George 43 Papademos, Lucas 64 Papandreou, George 56, 60 election 43 Greek referendum 61–62 resignation 2, 64 Party of Freedom 124 Poland 109, 113 Policy Exchange 1 political parties 124–125, 139–140 political union 10, 12, 133–134 Pompidou, Georges 10 Poos, Jacques 143 Portugal 110 bail-out 54, 57, 89–90 bond yields 37, 47, 53, 61, 89 public opinion of EU and euro 113 power, balance of 99–101 price stability goal of ECB 23 private-sector involvement (PSI) in debt restructuring 51–52 Prodi, Romano 17, 25, 97 Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) 130–131 public debt 15, 158–159 see also sovereign debt public opinion of EU and euro 121–124 Putin, Vladimir 149–150 Q qualified-majority voting 13, 20, 99, 121 negative qualified-majority voting 25, 195 quantitative easing (QE) 47, 15 R Rajoy, Mariano 70, 75–76, 127 recapitalisation, bank 58–59, 74–77, 84 redenomination 3–4, 153–154, 175 Reding, Viviane 139 referendums 27, 28, 121–122, 132 REFIT initiative 172 Regling, Klaus 26 Renzi, Matteo 107–108 rescue fund see European Stability Mechanism (ESM) resolution mechanism 90–91, 165, 195 single resolution mechanism (SRM) 195 single supervisory mechanism (SSM) 195 Romania 41, 108, 113, 124, 126, 147 Rome treaty 8, 97, 110, 193 Rösler, Philipp 78 Rueff, Jacques 9 Rumsfeld, Donald 143 Russia, influence on Ukraine 149–150 Rutte, Mark 77 S Samaras, Antonis 2, 78, 82, 93–94 Santer, Jacques 97 Sarkozy, Nicolas crisis response 40–41, 44 economic governance 49–50 European constitution 28 LTROs and the Sarkozy trade 69 Merkel collaboration 51–52, 60, 61–62, 102–103 Schäuble, Wolfgang 62, 75, 84, 90–91, 106, 111, 154 Schengen Agreement 110, 111–112 Schmidt, Helmut 11, 100 Schröder, Gerhard 18, 101, 127 Schulz, Martin 131 Schuman Day 8 Schuman, Robert 7–8 Scotland 112, 178 SDR (special drawing rights) 63 Securities Market Programme (SMP) 48, 79 services directive 34 Shafik, Nemat 65 Sikorski, Radek 109 Simitis, Costas 18 Simms, Brendan 179 single currency benefits 152 club within a club 112 driving forces 12–14 importance of 113 vision for 9 see also euro Single European Act 13, 193 single market 4, 137–138, 174–175 Sinn, Hans-Werner 101 six-pack 25, 50, 195 Slovakia 112 adoption of euro 41 influence 108 Slovenia 88–89, 112 influence 108 SMP (Securities Market Programme) 48, 79 snake in the tunnel 10 Solana, Javier 142 sovereign debt 165–166 see also public debt Spain 110 bail-out 70–73, 89 bank recapitalisation 84 bond yields 37, 89 CDS premiums 72 current-account balance 168 danger of collapse 59 excessive deficit procedure 89 finances pre-crisis 30 GDP growth 32 influence 107 public debt 159 public opinion of EU 123, 124 single currency views 17 unemployment 159 special drawing rights (SDR) 63 stability and growth pact 18, 24, 29, 50–51, 127, 194 Stark, Jürgen 59, 106 Steinbrück, Peer 43 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 24, 44, 57 stress tests, bank 72, 175 subsidiarity 133, 141 Sweden 109, 111, 112 euro opt-out 18, 115 UK sympathies 119 Syria 145 Syriza 124 T Target II 157 Thatcher, Margaret 27, 110, 116 third energy package 136 Tilford, Simon 34 Tindemans, Leo 111 trade policy 138 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) 138–139 treaty making and change 26–27, 173–174 Treaty of Amsterdam 111–112, 193 Treaty of Lisbon 28, 45, 194 foreign policy 142 institutions 20, 131 justice and home affairs (JHA) 139 subsidiarity 133 voting 20, 114 Treaty of Nice 194 Treaty of Rome 8, 97, 110, 193 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht treaty) 11–12, 15, 22, 142, 193 opt-outs and referendums 16, 110–111 Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance (TSCG) see fiscal compact treaty Tremonti, Giulio 54, 60 Trichet, Jean-Claude 151, 156 bond-buying 47–48, 52–53 crisis-management planning 2 early warnings 39–40 ECB president 23 IMF 44 Italy 59 True Finns 124 Turkey 132, 147, 148 Tusk, Donald 109, 114 two-pack 25, 89, 195 U UK Independence Party (UKIP) 118, 125, 140 Ukraine 149–150, 179–180 unemployment 158–159, 170 union method 19, 22 United Kingdom current-account balance 168 economic strengths and weaknesses 14 EMS exchange-rate mechanism 16 euro crisis reaction 117–118 euro membership 112 European budget contribution 27–28 European involvement 8, 10, 12, 115–119 future status 174–175 influence 100–101, 106, 109, 142–143 initial application to join EEC 9 opt-outs 110–111, 139 public opinion of EU 123 single currency views 17 United Left party 124 United States abandonment of gold standard 10 federalism model 177 foreign policy 143 performance compared with euro zone 154–155 Urpilainen, Jutta 77 V Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen (1963) 21 Van Rompuy, Herman 98 crisis-management planning 3 Cyprus 87 European Council presidency 20, 28 Italy 63 roadmap for integration 74–75, 84, 173 support for Greece 43–45 Venizelos, Evangelos 57, 62 Verhofstadt, Guy 131 Véron, Nicolas 35 Vilnius summit 149 von Weizsäcker, Jakob 166 W Waigel, Theo 17–18 Wall Street flash crash 47 Weber, Axel 49, 56, 106 Weidmann, Jens 40, 80, 82 Weizsäcker, Jakob von 166 Werner report (1971) 10 Wilson, Harold 116 Wolfson Prize 1 World Bank 33 World Trade Organisation 138–139 Y Yanukovych, Viktor 149 Z Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez 59, 62 Zollverein 9 PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997.


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The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Today, as the central bank of the fifty American states and the territories, and operating under delegated authority from Congress, the Fed has a mission to “provide the nation with a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system.” The ECB became operational in 1999. Working with national central banks that are also part of the Eurosystem, its goal is to maintain price stability, safeguard the common currency, and supervise credit institutions (predominantly banks). To pursue their objectives, all central banks are empowered to manage the country’s currency and money supply with a view to delivering specified macroeconomic objectives—universally, that of low and stable inflation, as well as, in some cases, high employment and economic growth.

Their heads were increasingly telling them to stop this experimentation and start “normalizing” policies, but their hearts urged them to do even more, and to look for something new in their bag of tricks. No one that I know of had accurately foreseen the length and depth of this policy dilemma. From day one in the financial crisis, the hope had been that our courageous and responsive central banks would succeed in handing off the baton to high growth, robust job creation, price stability, and financial system soundness—either directly or, more likely, by buying enough time for the private sector to heal and for politicians to enable other policy-making entities to finally step up to their economic governance responsibilities. And with economic prosperity and jobs returning, the world would be able in the medium term to grow out of its debt problems, avoiding the need for disorderly deleveraging, devastating austerity, debt defaults, etc.

End investors, including pension funds and university endowments, trust their capital to hedge fund managers with the understanding that the latters’ fiduciary responsibility is to pursue profits. Not so for central banks. For them profitable market outcomes are not a destination. It could be part of the journey dedicated to achieving macroeconomic objectives, mostly focused on growth and price stability, but even then, not necessarily so. Of course, there is some limit beyond which it becomes totally unreasonable to divorce highly elevated asset prices from sluggish fundamentals. The closer you get to this limit—and I believe we have gotten quite close—and the more elusive genuine growth is, the greater the risk of a subsequent disruptive collapse in prices that not only rapidly converge down toward levels warranted by fundamentals but also overshoot them.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

His ‘commodity dollar’ would encourage the public to think about the purchasing power of a dollar when it came to setting prices and writing contracts. Fisher’s idea was in direct contrast to the gold standard, the de facto economic policy of the day. The gold standard required the dollar to be exchangeable for a fixed quantity of gold, but it had not always been successful at achieving price stability. His concept of the commodity dollar required a dollar to be fixed in value against a group of commodities (goods), and its gold content adjusted to maintain its purchasing power. He had observed that, between 1873 and 1896, the dollar’s value increased as American prices fell. Fisher argued that this led to a prolonged depression as the supply of money was determined by the amount of gold, so the money supply was growing at a slower pace than was needed for the number of transactions necessary to maintain growth in the economy.

However, in calling for the abandonment of the gold standard, Fisher had placed himself at odds with the consensus of political and business opinion. Those who opposed Fisher’s idea at least saw the logic, but did not believe it would be easy or practical to implement. They were also worried about undermining confidence in the operation of the gold standard, which already had been exposed as a fallible system of price stability. Tinkering with the gold standard was not a preferred option. Any admission that it was not perfect, or that the value of the dollar might require adjustment, was considered subversive and liable to undermine confidence in both the operation of the system and the value of the dollar. After failing to convince President Woodrow Wilson of the merits of his plan, Fisher believed that he had to garner public opinion.

In other words, if the central bank is always there to bail a bank out, then a bank has less of an incentive to act prudently. Regulation can reduce this risk. In this respect, he would have welcomed the new macroprudential regulatory powers given to central banks after the 2008 financial crisis to target financial stability alongside their existing mandate of price stability. Fisher’s final years The years 1933 to 1939 saw a period of frantic effort by Fisher to solve the country’s problems and his own financial doldrums. He failed at both. The country wasn’t following his recommendations, his own assets would never recover their value and his debts would never go away.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

His ‘commodity dollar’ would encourage the public to think about the purchasing power of a dollar when it came to setting prices and writing contracts. Fisher’s idea was in direct contrast to the gold standard, the de facto economic policy of the day. The gold standard required the dollar to be exchangeable for a fixed quantity of gold, but it had not always been successful at achieving price stability. His concept of the commodity dollar required a dollar to be fixed in value against a group of commodities (goods), and its gold content adjusted to maintain its purchasing power. He had observed that, between 1873 and 1896, the dollar’s value increased as American prices fell. Fisher argued that this led to a prolonged depression as the supply of money was determined by the amount of gold, so the money supply was growing at a slower pace than was needed for the number of transactions necessary to maintain growth in the economy.

However, in calling for the abandonment of the gold standard, Fisher had placed himself at odds with the consensus of political and business opinion. Those who opposed Fisher’s idea at least saw the logic, but did not believe it would be easy or practical to implement. They were also worried about undermining confidence in the operation of the gold standard, which already had been exposed as a fallible system of price stability. Tinkering with the gold standard was not a preferred option. Any admission that it was not perfect, or that the value of the dollar might require adjustment, was considered subversive and liable to undermine confidence in both the operation of the system and the value of the dollar. After failing to convince President Woodrow Wilson of the merits of his plan, Fisher believed that he had to garner public opinion.

In other words, if the central bank is always there to bail a bank out, then a bank has less of an incentive to act prudently. Regulation can reduce this risk. In this respect, he would have welcomed the new macroprudential regulatory powers given to central banks after the 2008 financial crisis to target financial stability alongside their existing mandate of price stability. Fisher’s final years The years 1933 to 1939 saw a period of frantic effort by Fisher to solve the country’s problems and his own financial doldrums. He failed at both. The country wasn’t following his recommendations, his own assets would never recover their value and his debts would never go away.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

What should be avoided, he declared, were “unpredictable and erratic changes of direction in prices” which were “as disturbing to economic growth as to economic stability.” And that “past experience,” which he failed to elaborate upon, “suggests that something like a 3 to 5 per cent per year increase in the stock of money is required for long-term price stability,”43 though how he came to arrive at such precise figures he also omitted to explain. How could a steady 3 to 5 percent increase in prices be achieved? As he had already argued, the time delay between attempting to alter the quantity of money in an economy and the resulting effect on prices was at best guesswork.

He agreed that “pressures to increase the money supply to serve some presumed short-term objective are a basic source of inflationary pressure,” and that “excessive monetary expansion is a sufficient condition for inflation,” and “no important inflation can be sustained without money rising substantially faster than real income [i.e., incomes adjusted for inflation].” He agreed that “there is always some rate of monetary growth (perhaps zero) that will in principle achieve price stability. But still, I don’t think we can draw much comfort from those principles as a full explanation of where we are and a guide as to how to proceed.” He took as an example the acceleration in inflation since the 1960s. The rise in prices in the 1970s, for instance, was driven by “the oil situation, some crop failures, the spread of unions into some new areas, and shortages in particular industries that ran up against capacity pressures before the economy as a whole reached full employment.”

The rise in prices in the 1970s, for instance, was driven by “the oil situation, some crop failures, the spread of unions into some new areas, and shortages in particular industries that ran up against capacity pressures before the economy as a whole reached full employment.” Rather than invoke monetary changes to explain the persistent high inflation, “we have to ask ourselves about the nature of the economic, social, and political forces and attitudes that seem to have aggravated the difficulties of reconciling full employment with price stability.” Then came a warning. For central bankers to strictly limit the money supply according to some automatic formula, as Friedman advocated, might end up as an affront to democracy. Central banks could always resist inflationary pressures by simply refusing to provide enough funds to finance them, but such an approach would conflict with the goals of economic growth and full employment that were important national goals.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

There is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’ about the emergence of the euro in the contemporary international markets, and that is a source of both strength and weakness. To act as a world reserve currency the euro has had to gain global acceptability and credibility from scratch, and its institutional mechanisms were designed partly with this purpose in mind. The ECB and the Eurosystem were created with the express aim of ensuring price stability, which is necessary for the euro to act as a reserve of value. The global acceptability of the euro, on the other hand, encouraged the imposition of fiscal rigidity among member states, including the Growth and Stability Pact. The second aspect determining Germany’s conditional hegemony is that the euro was created in a period of rapid financialization of advanced economies, including leading countries such as Germany and France, and peripheral countries such as Portugal and Greece.

Furthermore, there has been a growing involvement of households and individuals with the private financial sector to borrow for housing and consumption, but also to manage pensions, insurance, and other assets. The EMU has served the interests of large European multinationals and financial institutions under conditions of advancing financialization. Price stability and control over inflation is a sine qua non for lenders and for financial capital. A homogeneous internal market for borrowing supported by liquidity generated by a powerful central bank was necessary for European banks to spread their operations globally. Fiscal discipline is typically required by lenders and by banks alike to protect their loan advances.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

At the heart of monetary union is the European Central Bank (ECB), envisioned in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and legally formed in 1998 pursuant to the Treaty of Amsterdam. The ECB issues the euro, which is a single currency for the eighteen nations that are Eurozone members. The ECB conducts monetary policy with a single mandate to maintain price stability in the Eurozone. It also trades in foreign exchange markets as needed to affect the euro’s value relative to other currencies. The ECB manages the foreign exchange reserves of the eighteen national central banks in the Eurozone and operates a payments platform among those banks called TARGET2.

Once the panic phase of a financially induced depression is over, the greatest impediment to capital investment is uncertainty about policy regimes related to matters such as taxes, health care, regulation, and other costs of doing business. Both the United States and the EU suffer from regime uncertainty. The Berlin Consensus is designed to remove as much uncertainty as possible by providing for price stability, sound money, fiscal responsibility, and uniformity across Europe on important regulatory matters. In turn, a positive business climate becomes a magnet for capital not just from local entrepreneurs and executives but also from abroad. This points to an emerging driver of EU growth harnessed to the Berlin Consensus—Chinese capital.

The debate over gold versus fiat money is really a debate between entrepreneurs and rentiers. A new gold standard has many possible designs and would be effective, depending on the design chosen and the conditions under which it was launched. The classical gold standard, from 1870 to 1914, was hugely successful and was associated with a period of price stability, high real growth, and great invention. In contrast, the gold exchange standard, from 1922 to 1939, was a failure and a contributing factor in the Great Depression. The dollar gold standard, from 1944 to 1971, was a middling success for two decades before it came undone due to a lack of commitment by its principal sponsor, the United States.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As Reagan put it – in a more memorable way than Hayek ever managed – ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.’5 Even then, the early years were touch and go: in 1981, Ronald Reagan sacked around 13,000 American air traffic controllers who went on strike in violation of the terms of their contracts, while even in her second term in office Margaret Thatcher was engaged in a ferocious battle with Britain’s coal miners. By the late 1980s, however, Reagan and Thatcher had won: the private sector had triumphed – at least philosophically – over the public sector, markets had succeeded where central planning had failed, macroeconomic policy was aimed at price stability, not full employment, and economic growth was to be achieved through ‘supply-side’ reform, not Keynesian-style demand management. Importantly, following Thatcher’s lead with her very early decision to abolish exchange controls, capital markets were to be subject to the discipline provided by international investors.

There was growing nervousness among the finance ministers regarding their ability to put on a united front: in particular, an uptick in inflationary pressures suggested that it would not be easy for Germany and Japan to keep interest rates low enough to encourage investors to move out of yen and DM into US dollars. Nevertheless, a deal was struck, and for a while the dollar stabilized. It wasn’t to last. Over the summer, as the effects on inflation of the earlier collapse in oil prices began to fade, the German Bundesbank became increasingly trigger-happy. Eventually, the high priests of German price stability decided to tweak interest rates a little higher. Madness then ensued. Baker had a public row with the German minister of finance, Gerhard Stoltenberg. With the US trade deficit still widening, the US dollar plunged. Within a few weeks, the US stock market had collapsed. For a short while, it appeared the game was up for international policy coordination.

The communiqué published at the end of the summit was full of confidence: We are undertaking an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion … We are committed to deliver the scale of sustained fiscal effort necessary to restore growth … Interest rates have been cut aggressively in most countries, and our central banks have pledged to maintain expansionary policies for as long as needed and to use the full range of monetary policy instruments, including unconventional instruments, consistent with price stability … We have provided significant and comprehensive support to our banking systems … We are committed to take all necessary actions to restore the normal flow of credit through the financial system … Taken together, these actions will constitute the largest fiscal and monetary stimulus … in modern times … We are confident that the actions we have agreed today, and our unshakeable commitment to work together to restore growth and jobs, while preserving long-term fiscal sustainability, will accelerate the return to trend growth.


pages: 312 words: 93,836

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

When the Federal Reserve realised that the interest rate cuts announced during the autumn were not filtering through to the money markets, it introduced the Term Auction Facility (TAF), an arrangement whereby US-based banks could borrow from the Federal Reserve without using the discount window. Similar market movements were observed in other currencies, with central banks across the developed world resorting to comparable measures. Central banks found themselves in a difficult position as the symmetry of the monetary transmission mechanism had broken down. Price stability through inflation targeting had gradually become more important than financial stability as a central bank goal. However, the former goal no longer applied. Having become more transparent themselves, central banks now had to rely on information and signals provided by the banks and the markets.

In other words, LIBOR had become a key variable that was used in assessing the effectiveness of central bank policy in dealing with the financial crisis.31 If LIBOR reacted promptly to what central banks did, the policy measure was deemed successful. If it didn’t, the measure was seen as misplaced or insufficient. Some central banks went even further, making LIBOR a strategic policy tool in itself. Since January 2000, the monetary policy strategy of the Swiss National Bank has consisted of three elements: ‘a definition of price stability, a medium-term inflation forecast and – at operational level – a target range for a reference interest rate, the three-month Swiss franc LIBOR’.32 Norges Bank, the central bank of Norway, publicly announces its projected monetary policy rate and also the future three-month Norwegian krone risk premiums, based on the three-month NIBOR.33 All of this might seem like a paradox, considering that the Eurodollar market was created in order to avoid the jurisdiction of the central banks.

., 45 buy and sell orders, 208 ‘call-outs’, 24; symptom assessing, 25 ‘Can do More’, 144 Canada: dollar, 33; Foreign Exchange Committee, 179 Canary Wharf, London, 6 Cantor Fitzgerald, London office, 264 capital controls, abolishment, 133 Carr Futures, World Trade Centre office, 264 cash markets, importance loss, 139 cash squeezes, year-end, 44 cash-settled derivatives; benchmark need, 122–3; made market, 133 cassettes, history of, 110–11 CDOs (collateralised debt obligations), 11 central bank, 151; -banks unique relationship, 173; foreign exchange interventions, 233; inflation rate target, 70; LIBOR key variable, 53, 151; LIBOR use, 152; money pumping, 50; power, 174; power overestimated, 49, 54; price stability goal, 51; repos, 175; tips, 176; transparency, 40, 166–7; unexpected interest rate moves, 41; weakening of, 114 Channel 4 News, 11 Chase Manhattan, 131 Chemical Bank (JPMorgan Chase), 30 CIBOR (Copenhagen Interbank Offered Rate), 28, 78–9 Citibank, 29, 30, 58, 101, 153, 155, 182, 188, 193, 220, 223; benchmark manipulation fine, 160; ‘Scandi’ desk, 33; Tokyo dealing room, 196 CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), 123, 1288; Eurodollar futures, 126 collateral types, central banks lowering, 50 competition law, UK and EU, 222 complex structured products, valuation inability, 50 compliance departments banks, 253; post-scandals increase, 283 Cooke, Mr Justice, 282 copycat behaviour, market making, 202–3 Cosmopolis, 250 counterparties, confirmations, 18 Countrywide, 49 CPI, Inflation index, 149 credit: default swap market, 99; officers, 95; rating agencies, 96; risk, 137; risk measure for, 55 Crédit Agricole Indosuez, 37, 44, 58–9, 134, 155 Crédit Suisse, 153, 193, 221, 223; First Boston, 127 creditworthiness: ‘image problem’, 51; judgments on, 225; signals, 98, 99 cross-currency basis swap, LIBOR-indexed, 62 CRSs, 129 Darin, Roger, 115 dealing relationships, informal reciprocal, 227 dealing rooms, internal monitoring increase, 283 deceptive behaviour, LIBOR banks, 105; quotes post-crisis pressure, 106 Del Missier, Jerry, 77 Den Danske bank, 178 derivatives, ‘abstract’, 123–4; benchmark use, 150; borrowing and lending idea, 138; concrete type, 121; growing market, 79; interest rates, 30; LIBOR-indexed, 28, 71, 80, 104, 129; new instruments, 18; textbook explanation, 119–20; trade tickets, 141’usefulness’ of, 131 derivatives market: benchmark need, 119; LIBOR importance, 37; Scandanavia, 27 Deutsche Bank, 153, 193, 223; LIBOR controls deceptions, 183; LIBOR fine, 83 Diamond, Bob, 77 Dillon Read, 49 ‘discount windows’ lowering, 50 ‘dishonesty’, 249 Donohue, Craig, 128 dot-com bubble, 104 downgrades, credit rating agencies, 96 Dresdner Bank, 17, 155, 197 Duffy, Terry, 128 Easton Ellis, Bret, American Psycho, 236 economic data releases, examples of, 38 efficient market hypothesis, 195, 200–1; unrealistic assumption, 196 ‘emerging markets’, trading desks, 37 ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism) crisis, 31–2 Ermotti, Sergio, 213 EURIBOR (Euro Interbank Offered Rate), 14, 76–8, 126, 130; derivatives, 145; new unpredictability, 62; pre-Euro, 148 euro, the: Eurozone crisis, 109; launch of, 36 eurocurrency market, 113; central bank weakening, 111; deregulated, 114; Eurodollars, see below; fast growth of, 112; LIBOR derivatives replaced, 134 Eurodollar market, 113, 133, 152; advantages, 112; banks made, 117, 125; contracts standard maturity dates, 126; financial deregulation prompt, 116; futures, see below; gradual reduction of, 136; history of, 111; LIBOR rate making, 117, 129; rapid growth of, 115 Eurodollar futures, 125, 128, 265; bets on, 146; rationale for, 129; success of, 127 Euromoney, 135 European Banking Federation, 180 European Central Bank (ECB), 50, 109, 145 European Commission, 221 Euroyen LIBOR futures contract, 127 ‘Events’ central bank meetings, 40 excessive lending, inflationary fears, 114 exclusivity, self-perception, 269 expectations, games of, 103; overpriced stock, 104 ‘expert judgments’, banks LIBOR quotes, 278 Fama, Eugene, 195 ‘fat fingers’ errors, 253 FBI, USA, 192–3 FCA (Financial Conduct Authority), 183–4, 188, 219, 282; Fair and Effective Markets Review, 222; prohibited individuals list, 285 fear, rumours of, 266 Federal Reserve, see USA FIBOR (Frankfurt Interbank Offered Rate), 19, 127 financial crisis, Asia 1997, 36 financial crisis 2007–8; decent culture erosion explanation, 279; familiar analysis of, 114; financial market illuminating, 275; -LIBOR implications, 52, 111; money markets freeze, 109 financial markets: cartels, 222; deregulation 115–16; instruments liquidity, 43; misconceptions, 236; self-regulated, 113, 171; see also, money markets Finers Stephens Innocent, 3 Finland: USSR collapse impact, 20; USSR Winter War, 65 ‘firm policy’, interbank spread choosing, 229 fixed exchange rates, sustainability, 32 flat switch, 92–5 flow traders, 143 Forex, 1995 exam, 223; reciprocity endorsed, 227 FRAs (forward rate agreements), 28, 75, 91, 129–30; growth of, 148 Friday dress policy, 135 FSA (Financial Services Authority), UK, 1–2, 67, 77, 98, 105, 124, 163, 180, 243; prohibition orders, 4; suspension, 5 ‘Full Amount’ call, weakness indicator, 143 funding costs:, averages, 104; LIBOR signalling, 97; -market liquidity relation, 44 futures contracts: agricultural, 120; cash-settled, 125; transparent exchanges, 63 FX (foreign exchange) market, 172, 196, 245; bank price influence, 212; big banks domination/market concentration, 193, 195, 210, 212, 223, 234; ‘clear the decks’, 210; ‘community’, 190; ethical problem, 213; global banks 2014 fines, 188; interbank spread survey, 228; interest rate markets joining, 31; Japanese banks borrowing, 33; London ‘banging the close’; 209; non-public information grey zone, 224; order books, 7; reciprocity, 224; scale of significance, 126, 192, 232; spot market desk, 214, 217; standardised norms, 194; swap market, see below; ‘The Cartel’, 220; traders, see below; turnover scale, 212 FX swap market, 134, 137, 145, 146; interest rate speculation, 133; Japanese traders, 34; lower credit risk, 137, 144; 9/11 trading, 265; spot-prices, 31, 227 FX traders, 191; club mentality, 269; desks, 30; respect among, 269; secret code us, 219; ‘techniques’, 204; varied backgrounds, 216 Gelboim, Ellen, 153 gentlemen’s agreements, 141 ‘getting married to your position’, trading attitude, 257–8 global merchandise exports, growth, 112 Goldman Sachs, 49, 140, 193, 223, 272 Goodhart, Charles, 173 Greece, 2015 ATM queues, 109 Greenspan, Alan, 15, 51, 173–4 Greenwald, Bruce, 225 guilt, feelings of, 78, 169, 243, 259 Häyhä, Simo (‘White Death’), 65 ‘Hambros’, 194 Harley, Dean, 231 Hayes, Tom, 8, 13, 72, 92–3, 115, 238; prison sentence, 12 HBOS, 183 headhunters, 160 HELIBOR (Helsinki Interbank Offered Rate), 28 Hester, Stephen, 284 Hintz, Brad, 10 HSBC, bank, 27, 153, 155, 188, 193, 208, 213, 223; FCA fine, 219; FX trading, 116, 187; Group Management Training College, 187; Stockholm, 31 Hull, John, 150 Hunger Games series, 255 Hyogo Bank default, 33 ICAP, 86, 101, 175; LIBOR fine, 85 ICMA (International Capital Market Association), 174 IKB bank, 50; rollover problems, 49 illiquidity, temporary, 43 Indonesia, financial crisis, 36 Industrial Bank of Japan, 34 ‘industry’, financial, 154–5 information: LIBOR delays problem, 49, 54; big banks superior, 210 instincts, 226 interbank money market, 38; central bank influence, 39; efficiency estimate change, 109; lending fall, 111; LIBOR, see below interest rate(s): benchmarks, 14; central banks forecasts, 166; changes impact of, 38; derivatives, 17, 174; hedging, 128; movement, 42; short-term, 28, 133; swaps sizes, 142 International Code of Conduct and Practice for the, 216 International Monetary Market (IMM), 72; contracts conventions, 126; LIBOR fixings, 73–4 investment banks, risk takers, 272 Ireland, Financial Regulator, 4, 168, 281 IRS, interest rate swap, 129–30; short-term, 140 ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association), 174; fix, 14 Japan: bank sector/system: crisis, 47, 81; dollars difficulty period, 34; fear premium, 36; Financial Services Agency, 101; FX market concentration, 193; FX ‘premium’, 35–6; safe perception change, 33; unique derivatives market, 36; yen market, 8, 45 JP Morgan/JP Morgan Chase, 92, 105, 153, 178, 188, 192–3, 220–3 Kahneman, Daniel, 255 Kerviel, Jérôme, 250 Keynes, J.M., General Theory of Employment, 102 Kipling, Rudyard, 127 KLIBOR (Kuala Lumpur), 37 Knight, Angela, 107 Lapavitsas, Costas, 6–7 layering, 204 Leeson, Nick, 250 ‘legacy issues’, 236 Lehman Brothers, 2, 10, 48–9, 59, 105, 162, 272; bankruptcy filing, 160; collapse of aftermath, 96 Lewis, Ken, 164 LIBOR, 19, 28, 76–7, 104, 127, 130, 147, 209, 234, 265; anti-competitive process, 186; banking lobby regulated, 180–1; ‘barometer of fear’, 96; benchmark significance, 192, 225; central banks perfection assumption, 49; controls deception, 184; crisis-induced ‘stickiness’, 106; crucial price, 13; daily individual quotes, 97; derivatives, see below; ‘Eurodollar futures’ origin, 126; FCA regulated, 282; ‘fear’ index, 15; fixing panels, see below; future direction of, 38; inaccuracy possibilities, 74; interbank money market gauge, 39; jurisdiction issue, 115; manipulation, 7, 12, 14, 78; manipulation impossibility assumption, 81; market-determined perception, 88, 149; mechanism, 104; minute change importance, 73; new unpredictability, 62; 1980s invention, 111; objective process ‘evidence’, 148; perception of, 119; players as referees, 80; post 2007 interest, 53; pre-2013 unregulated, 118; predicting difficulty, 70; regulatory oversight lack, 179; retail credit impact, 277; sanctioned secrecy, 181–2; savings and borrowings dominance, 107; scandal breaking, 81; state measure use, 151; three-months, 71; ‘too big to fail’, 279; use of limited post-scandal, 278 LIBOR derivatives market, 8, 45, 137–8, 232; autonomous development of, 111; banks made, 125; ‘community’, 190; -FX connected, 189; imaginary money market, 148; increased abstraction of, 144–6 LIBOR panel banks, 74–5, 79, 98, 118, 172, 282; -LIBOR implications, 52 big banks dominated, 173, 179–80; fixing process, 75; membership criteria, 184–5; punishment idea, 108; post-scandal membership, 186 LIBOR scandal, 77, 152, 167, 245; correctness attempts, 277; post- definition unchanged, 278; breaking of, 81; Wall Street Journal on, 238 LIBOR-OIS spread(s), 51, 54–5, 99, 151 LIFFE, 126–7 liquidity: and credit crunch 2008, 2; credit issues, 45; informal norms need, 284; provision ‘duty’ 229; risk, 42–3, 55, 70 Lloyds Bank, 153, 183; LIBOR fine, 83 long/short positions, 26 Lukes, Steven, 186 makers, price, 24 Malaysia, financial crisis, 36 Mankell, Henning, 235 ‘marked to market’ trading books, 62 market, the financial: ‘colour’ 202; ‘conventions’, 228–33; ‘courtroom’, 171; interbank spread choosing ‘image’, 229; liquidity risk, 42–3; making, see below; perfections of, 15; relationships dependent, 225–6; risks limits management failure, 281 market makers/making, 24, 72, 117, 201, 206, 217, 226–7, 257; ‘ability’, 185; cash-settled derivatives, 133; failure to manage, 281; NIBOR IRS, 132; profession of, 200; two-way price quoting, 228; visibility of, 202 Martin Brokers, 85 Mathew, Jonathan, 139 McAdams, Richard, 231 McDermott, Tracey, 282 Meitan Tradition, 100, 175 Merita Bank, 56 Merrill Lynch, 2–3, 8–9, 12, 46, 49, 59–60, 62, 64, 69, 92–3, 96, 140, 153, 155, 160–1, 164, 188, 272, 285; Bank of America takeover, 67; bonuses, 10, 162–3; financial centre, 48; International Bank Limited Dublin, 4; mismarking, 68; risk taking encouraged, 281; silence rule, 242 Midland Montagu (Midland Bank Stockholm Branch), 20, 22–3, 27, 29; Stockholm, 22, 29 ‘Millenium bug’ fears, LIBOR impact, 44 mismarking, 9 mistakes, fear of, 26 Mollenkamp, Carrick, 98 ‘monetary transmission mechanism’, 39 money market(s): decentralised, 224; freeze, 110; international basis, 112; ‘risk premium’, 42; stable illusion-making, 106; -state link, 224 Moody’s, 96 morals, 66; morality, 69 Morgan Stanley, 49, 193, 223, 272 mortgage bonds, 21 NASDAQ stock exchange, transparency, 220 New York 2001 attacks, 263 New York Times, 4, 9, 11, 163, 241, 243 NIBOR (Norwegian Interbank Offered Rate), 28, 72, 130–1; fixing dates, 76; inaccurate fixing, 74; IRS market, 132; new unpredictability, 62; one month IRS market, 136 nicknames, use of, 25–6 Nordbanken, nationalised, 27 Nordic bank branches, 30 Norges Bank, NIBOR use, 152 Norinchukin Bank, 153 Northern Rock, Newcastle queues, 109 Norway, banking system, 131 ‘objective’ fact, LIBOR, 149 ‘off-balance-sheet’, trading, 137–8 official interest rate, predicting, 38 OIS (overnight index swap), 51; see also LIBOR-OIS one month IRS market, 136 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), US dollar surpluses, 113 options desk, FX, 214 ‘over-the-counter’ trades, 63 derivatives, 129, 134; interest rate options, 130; markets, 227 Philippines, financial crisis, 37 Philips, cassette launch, 111 PIBOR (Paris Interbank Offered Rate), 19, 127 post scandals, reforms, 282 price(s), as interactions, 200; brokers indications role, 87; ‘resolution hypothesis’, 218 primary dealers, 175, 178 privacy, individual rights to, 167 Rabobank, LIBOR fine, 83, 153, 282 RBC, bank, 223 RBS, bank, 92, 153, 185, 188, 192, 220–1, 223, 284; LIBOR scandal fine, 83 reciprocity: -and trust, 226, 284; informal agreements, 228 regret, fear of, 258 regulatory arbitrage: Eurodollar market prompting, 118; platform for, 114 ‘reputation’, 185 respect, among traders, 267 Reuters, 19, 79, 151; Dealing, 41, 195, 260; Dealing 2000–2, 29, 34, 194; indicative prices, 62; screen price, 53 risk, 135; buzz of, 261–2; limits breaking, 274; ‘loss aversion’, 255; managers, 253; organizational limits, 250; pressures for, 63 risk taking: addictive, 262; enjoyment of, 260; fear control, 263; increase, 73; individualistic, 262; reward anticipation, 254; reward interpretation, 259; supervision need, 253 risk takers, 270; respect among, 268–9 Robert, Alain, 260 ‘rogue traders’, 1, 237; ‘bad apples’ narrative, 237, 240, 246, 279; fame, 252; fascination with, 246; losses, 259; ranking list, 250; risk list, 251; scandals, 258; stigma, 247 rogue trading, 274; definitions, 249; labelling, 248; risk link, 250 Royal Bank of Canada, 153 RP Martins, 153 rules of the game, loyalty to, 25 ‘run-throughs’, 87–9, 226–7 Russia, financial crisis, 36 Ryan, Ian, 3, 9, 68 Sanford C.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

Throughout the month, policy makers repeatedly alluded to concerns for both economic growth and price stability. Bernanke called rising oil prices unwelcome, and Paulson emphasized that they would be “a real headwind” for the economy. With respect to the exchange rate, Bernanke emphasized that the Fed would “carefully monitor” its implications for inflation and inflation expectations, while Paulson even suggested that he “would never take intervention off the table.”28 The pickup in inflationary pressures prompted a shift of the Fed’s priorities from preventing debt and economic risks to growth and toward assuring price stability. As early as June 4, Bernanke noted that further interest-rate cuts were unlikely due to concerns over inflation, and suggested that the current policy rate was sufficient to promote moderate growth.29 A few days later Bernanke gave a speech noting that the rising commodity prices and the dollar’s depressed value posed a challenge for anchoring long-term inflation.

It was at this time that conflicts both within countries and between countries intensified, sowing the seeds of populism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and militarism that at first led to economic warfare and then military warfare in Europe in September 1939 and with Japan in December 1941. Second Half of 1932: Further Contractions and the Election of FDR By the summer, the big stimulation and relief to banks appeared to be helping. The downward spiral began to moderate, asset prices stabilized, and production actually increased in certain areas of the economy, like autos. From May through June, commodities, stocks, and bonds all bottomed. Markets for both stocks and bonds improved during the second half of the year. In August and September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied to a peak of 80, almost double its July low.

Simultaneously oil prices continued to climb (hitting $130 in late May) and the dollar continued to fall. These moves added to the Fed’s dilemma, as it would have to balance keeping its policy accommodative to ward off an economic contraction and a further deterioration in financial conditions with concerns over price stability. The minutes of the Fed’s April meeting reflected this, with the committee acknowledging “the difficulty of gauging the appropriate stance of policy in current circumstances.” Two members even expressed “substantial concerns about the prospects for inflation” and warned that “another reduction in the funds rate…could prove costly over the long run.”


pages: 193 words: 48,066

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

The six members of the ECB’s Executive Board, together with the governors of the other central banks, comprise the Governing Council of the ECB; and none of these banks, nor any member of their decision-making organs, is to take instructions from any other body. The ‘primary objective’ of the ESCB is ‘to maintain price stability’ though, subject to that overriding requirement, it is also to support the Union’s ‘general economic policies’. The ECB has the sole right to authorize the issue of notes, and to approve the quantity of coins issued by the states’ mints. In response to German preference, the single currency was named the euro, rather than the French-sounding ecu.

European Central Bank (ECB): Responsible for monetary policy for the Eurozone. Based in Frankfurt, the ECB is run by an Executive Board. Its members and the governors of central banks in the Eurozone comprise ECB’s Governing Council. ECB and central banks together form the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), whose primary objective is to maintain price stability. None of these participants may take instructions from any other body. European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC): Launched by the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, placing coal and steel sectors of six states (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands) under a system of common governance.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

The institutional embodiment of multilateralism in trade during the fifty years subsequent to the Bretton Woods Conference was the GATT. The GATT was only part of what was originally meant to be a more ambitious organization, the International Trade Organization (ITO). The proposed ITO included agreements on commodity price stabilization, international antitrust, and fair labor standards, but it floundered in domestic U.S. politics. The Congress worried that it encroached too much on domestic prerogatives. Even though the GATT was not constituted formally as a full-fledged organization like the IMF or the World Bank, it was managed by a small secretariat in Geneva.

Once markets’ dynamics became intertwined with domestic politics, there was no hope that a world of smoothly functioning, self-equilibrating finance would lie within reach. Keynes identified another, more fundamental problem. Unfettered capital flows undermined not only financial stability but also macroeconomic equilibrium—full employment and price stability. The idea that the macroeconomy would self-adjust, without help from domestic fiscal and monetary policies, had been buried by the experience of the Great Depression and the chaos of the 1930s. Even in periods of relative calm, the combination of fixed exchange rates with capital mobility enslaved a country’s economic management to other countries’ monetary policies.

Deep integration with the world economy would solve Argentina’s short-and long-term problems. This was the Washington Consensus taken to an extreme, and it turned out to be right about the short term, but not the long term. Cavallo’s strategy worked wonders on the binding constraint of the moment. The Convertibility Law eliminated hyperinflation and restored price stability practically overnight. It generated credibility and confidence—at least for a while—and led to large capital inflows. Investment, exports, and incomes all rose rapidly. As we saw in chapter Six, Argentina became a poster child for multilateral organizations and globalization enthusiasts in the mid-1990s, even though policies like the Convertibility Law had clearly not been part of the Washington Consensus.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

These tolls and fees are burdens on global trade and economic growth paid by the production sector of the economy to the financial sector. But it is the sum of all these activities—hedging, speculation, and derivatives—that accounts for the oceanic span of liquid and available currency services. As Friedman taught us, currency speculation can assure price stability. Speculation, in his view, could be destabilizing only if the speculators lost money. But money losers would eventually exit the market, leaving the profitable speculators (like those ten big U.S. banks full of computers and specialists) in charge, accurately arbitraging among the currencies and smoothing out the divergences.

“E-Commerce Speeds Up, Hits Record High Share of Retail Sales,” MarketWatch (blog), August 15, 2014, http://blogs.marketwatch.com/capitolreport/2014/08/15/e-commerce-speeds-up-hits-record-high-share-of-retail-sales/. 3.Susan Vranica, “The Secret about On-Line Ad Traffic, One-Third is Bogus,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453253860786362. 4.Nick Szabo, “Macroscale Replicator,” October 19, 1995. 5.Szabo’s blog, Unenumerated, is published online by Forbes.com. All the quotations here are from the Unenumerated archive. 6.Richard Vigilante, personal communication. CHAPTER 8: WHERE “HAYEKS” GO WRONG 1.Ferdinando M. Ametrano, “Hayek Money: The Cryptocurrency Price Stability Solution,” Social Science Research Network, revised July 5, 2015, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2425270, 54. Ametrano’s paper was shortlisted as a finalist for the Blockchain Awards, category Visionary Academic Paper, at the Bitcoin Foundation Conference 2014, but it lost to Nakamoto’s original breakthrough paper. 2.Ibid., 5–6. 3.Ibid., 10. 4.Ibid., 20; and Friedrich A.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

The targeting is very poor and the leakages are huge. The subsidy for rice and wheat is enormous and amounts to 1 per cent of GDP. As explained in Chapters 8 and 10, it would be far cheaper and more effective to give poor people cash or vouchers to buy food at market prices, with government intervention restricted to running a price stabilization scheme. NATIONAL GAIN FROM UNWINDING SUBSIDIES The above account covers only some of the most conspicuous subsidies but there are plenty of others, even if they do not figure explicitly in the budget. Elimination of all dysfunctional subsidies deserves to be a prime component of an intelligent reform agenda.

Even so, demand management, on its own, will not achieve low inflation in India today (or at least not without intolerable cost). There are two systemic supply-​side factors that create an inflationary bias. Firstly, there is the nature of state intervention in the food market. Such intervention is not necessarily a bad thing. In an economy that is subject to volatile swings in agricultural production, a price-​stabilization scheme run by the government makes good sense. A responsible government may also quite rightly [ 142 ] Stability and Inclusion 143 wish to protect the poorest people against food destitution. How would these tasks be organized in a rational system? The government would assure farmers a ‘procurement price’ (in other words a price at it which it stands ready to buy food from them) that is equal to an average of market prices expected to rule in good and bad years, thereby shielding them from price instability.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that the TPDS is ripe for abolition if a more efficient substitute could be found; and this leads to the thought that the objective of ensuring food security would be better achieved by making cash transfers to people, which they could use to buy food in the market. The state could continue with price stabilization via buffer stocks but it could get out of the business of distribution, in which the private sector has a comparative advantage. Up to two-​thirds of government spending on food subsidies could thus be saved and used for other socially desirable purposes. The second pillar of the social protection framework is the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), initiated by an Act in 2006 and rolled out across the country by 2008.10 It guarantees, S a f e t y N e t s a n d S o ci a l P r o t e c t i o n [ 203 ] 204 as a legislated right, up to 100 days of employment a year to any rural household at a specified minimum wage indexed to the cost of living.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Without a clear guide to the objective of monetary policy, and a credible commitment to meeting it, any rise in inflation might become a self-fulfilling and generalised increase in prices and wages. And surely the lesson of the past fifty years is that, when inflation becomes embedded, the cost of getting it back down again is a prolonged period of sluggish output and high unemployment. Price stability—returning inflation to the target—is a precondition for sustained growth, not an alternative. Price stability was not a precondition for anything, let alone sustained growth. It turns out targeting inflation meant too many policymakers failed to spot the biggest recession in a generation. Since then we have continued to have a growth problem and a “too little” inflation problem.

There are obviously a number of deep factors driving the labor productivity puzzle, but we have to accept that real wages and labor productivity are closely linked. In addition, the labor share has been remarkably stable in this period. The nominal part of the wage story is presumably connected to the attainment of price stability. We simply do not expect price inflation to hit 10 percent anymore, and this may partly explain why a pay norm seems to have been anchored around 2 percent for several years around the world. In reality, the high level of labor market slack and the weakness of worker bargaining power are keeping pay and price inflation down.

Janet Yellen in a speech in September 2017 raised the possibility that, indeed, the natural rate has fallen and perhaps by a lot: Some key assumptions underlying the baseline outlook could be wrong in ways that imply that inflation will remain low for longer than currently projected. For example, labor market conditions may not be as tight as they appear to be, and thus they may exert less upward pressure on inflation than anticipated. The unemployment rate consistent with long-run price stability at any time is not known with certainty; we can only estimate it. The median of the longer-run unemployment rate projections submitted by FOMC participants last week is around 4-1/2 percent. But the long-run sustainable unemployment rate can drift over time because of demographic changes and other factors, some of which can be difficult to quantify—or even identify—in real time.


pages: 708 words: 196,859

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

Despite their role as national institutions determining credit policy for their entire countries, in 1914 most central banks were still privately owned. They therefore occupied a strange hybrid zone, accountable primarily to their directors, who were mainly bankers, paying dividends to their shareholders, but given extraordinary powers for entirely nonprofit purposes. Unlike today, however, when central banks are required by law to promote price stability and full employment, in 1914 the single most important, indeed overriding, objective of these institutions was to preserve the value of the currency. At the time, all major currencies were on the gold standard, which tied a currency in value to a very specific quantity of gold. The pound sterling, for example, was defined as equivalent to 113 grains of pure gold, a grain being a unit of weight notionally equal to that of a typical grain taken from the middle of an ear of wheat.

“I have a great respect for his ability and the freshness and versatility of his mind, but I am much afraid of some of his more erratic ideas, which impressed me as being the product of a vivid imagination without very much practical experience.” The hidden irony was that every one of Keynes’s main recommendations—that the link between gold balances and the creation of credit be severed, that the automatic mechanism of the gold standard be replaced with a system of managed money, that credit policy be geared toward domestic price stability—corresponded precisely to the policies Strong had instituted in the United States. During the war, the flow of gold into the United States had pushed up prices by 60 percent. When the fighting ended, but turmoil in Europe continued and the gold still kept arriving, Strong decided that it was time to abandon the conventional rules of the gold standard and insulate the U.S. economy from the flood of bullion.

Led by Strong, the Fed had undertaken a totally new responsibility—that of promoting internal economic stability. It was Strong more than anyone else who invented the modern central banker. When we watch Ben Bernanke or, before him, Alan Greenspan or Jean-Claude Trichet or Mervyn King describe how they are seeking to strike the right balance between economic growth and price stability, it is the ghost of Benjamin Strong who hovers above him. It all sounds quite prosaically obvious now, but in 1922 it was a radical departure from more than two hundred years of central banking history. Strong’s policy of offsetting the impact of gold inflows on domestic credit conditions meant that as bullion came into the United States, it was, in effect, withdrawn from circulation.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

., cotton), metals (e.g., copper), and other vital tangible elements of American production and consumption, such as rubber. In other words, just as gold had enjoyed greater stability by being the constituent element of the monetary unit (the dollar), by being elevated to constituent elements of the dollar, the price stability of the primary inputs of production would be enhanced considerably. The improved stability of these primary “inputs” would, in Graham's view, then ripple throughout the economy, leading to greater overall stability in pricing, production, consumption, profitability, and employment. During downturns, the government would purchase a reserve of this basket of goods (on an established proportional basis set by the government) from its suppliers to absorb excess capacity.

These are some of the reasons why it is somewhat surprising that, of the two economists, it was Hayek, of the less interventionist Austrian school, who gave Graham “strong support of the plan in its international application.”70 In fact, Hayek wrote a full-length article endorsing the plan titled “A Commodity Reserve Currency,”71 which was published in the June–September 1943 issue of the Economic Journal. As for Keynes, his support was more equivocal, as he considered rising prices to be more conducive to full employment than Graham's objective of price stabilization. Nonetheless, he did recognize the merit of other aspects of Graham's plans. As Keynes wrote in a personal letter to Graham, “On the use of buffer stocks as a means of stabilizing short-term commodity prices, you and I are ardent crusaders on the same side.”72 According to Kahn and Milne, “Ben exchanged a number of letters with John Maynard Keynes on this and other economic topics.”73 Whatever one's opinion of his plan may be, it is a testament to his extraordinary intellect and writing skills that Graham, with no formal economic training, could conceive, develop, and present his plan in such a way as to elicit considered (and, on balance, positive) responses from two of the greatest economists of the era (and, indeed, of modern history).

., 102 Morningstar, 166 Munger, Charlie, 54, 135, 138, 246, 252 Murray, Roger, 256 mutual funds, 94 names, “Americanization” of, 17 National Presto Industries, 306 National Transit, 148 “nature versus nurture,” 21 negative (inefficient) information volatility, 167 Newburger, Alfred, 76, 103 Newburger, Bob, 103 Newburger, Henderson, and Loeb, 76, 98, 103, 108 Newburger, Samuel, 104 “New Deal,” 184, 209 Newman, Douglas, 143 Newman, Jerry, 136, 143, 149 Newman, Mickey, 240 Newman and Graham LP, 234 New School for Social Research, 185 New York Institute of Finance, 36, 50, 156, 244 New York State Guard, 109 New York State War Finance Committee, 195 New York Stock Exchange, origins of, 102 Nippon Club in Manhattan, 113 Nomura, 258 “nonethnic” names, 100 Northern Pipe Line Company, 145–47 option warrants, 288 Orthodox Judaism, 18 over-the-counter houses, 149 overvaluation, 81 owner orientation, 134 panic selling, 172 Parikh, Parag, 173–74 partnerships vs. corporations, 183 “passive” investors, 84 Pat Dorsey/Sanibel Captiva, 257 Pennsylvania Savold, 116 performance, long-term, 52 Perlmeter, Stan, 253 Plymouth Cordage, 150 positive (efficient) information volatility, 167 Poulet, David, 259 Powers, Barnard, 116 price and value, divergence between, 129 price fluctuations, 171 price stabilization, 216 price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), 149 “price trending” methods, 107 price volatility, 45 principal, safety of, 36, 51 principles of corporate valuation, 159 property values, 96 qualitative and quantitative factors, distinction between, 81 qualitative factors, 54 quantitative analysis, 98 quantitative diagnostics, 96 Quirt, John, 292 Ranson, David, 217 Rea, James, 305 Rea-Graham fund, 305 reasoning, 38 Reiter, Charlotte, 236, 272–73, 295 “research and analysis,” 106 revenue-generating enterprise, 131 risk, minimizing, 49–51 Robert Hagstrom/Legg Mason Capital Management, 257 Roberts, Scott & Co., Inc., 305 Rockefeller, John D., 146 Rockefeller Foundation, 146–48 Roll, Richard W., 314 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 150–51, 184, 207, 293 Ross, Nikki, 137, 175 Ruane, Bill, 156, 230, 244 Ruane & Cunniff, 248 Rubel, David, 141 Russo, Mark, 259 Russo, Tom, 55 Safron, Edythe (Kenner), 198, 299 Sanders, Henry, 195 S&P 500, 93–94 Sarnat, Bernard, 20, 74–75, 183, 230 Sarnat, Gerry, 267 Sarnat, Rhoda, 20, 67, 266–67 Schaffer Cullen Capital Management, 257 Schloss, Edwin, 245 Schloss, Walter, 134–35, 244 Schroeder, Alice, 228–29 Schwartz, Anna, 205–206 screening tools, online, 92–93 screens for bond selection, 89–92 for defensive investors, 85–87 for enterprising investors, 87–89 Sears, Steven, 174 securities, 36 security analysis, system of, 38 security analysts, 40, 98 security-selection principles, 223 self-education, 58 selloff, 127 Semper Vic Partners LP, 259 Sequoia Fund, 50, 248–49 Seth Klarman/Baupost Group, 257 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 145 Sherry (Siamese cat), 193–94 Sherry II (Siamese cat), 194 Sherry Netherland Hotel, 193 “shorting,” defined, 141–42 silent partner, 131 “sitting shiva,” 25 Skirball, Jack, 268 Slade, Helen, 195 Smith, Adam, 257–58, 292 Smith Barney, 232 Social Security, 293 Sonkin, Paul, 242 speculation, unsound, 51 “speculative enthusiasm,” 125 speculative investments, 130 Standard Oil (John D.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

No one was buying “the price is always right/state bad and market good” story when prices had been shown to be wrong by a few orders of magnitude and the state was bailing out the market. Furthermore, neoclassical policy was entirely focused on avoiding one problem, inflation, and providing one outcome, stable prices. It seemed to have very little to say about a world in which deflation was now the worry, and price stabilization meant raising, not lowering, inflation expectations. Helping such ideas along was the fact that, as Henry Farrell and John Quiggin put it, “There was a significant Keynesian party hidden in the academy,” and it found unexpected allies.7 Neoclassical economists and fellow travelers who were publicly reassessing their own beliefs during the crisis, such as Martin Feldstein and Richard Posner, joined prominent Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in the campaign for stimulus, lending Keynesian ideas a new prestige.

But if politicians cannot, in the language that this literature spawned, “credibly commit” to a given policy, both voters and market agents will discount government policies and attempt to offset their effects, which will lead to greater economic instability and uncertainty. Kydland and Prescott argued that the key to solving this problem was for the central bank to be made independent from politicians and, in the manner of the Bundesbank, to be mandated to pay attention only to price stability. Critical here were a set of institutional reforms designed to shield the central bank from public scrutiny and central bankers from public recall or redress, while ensuring that these bankers are more conservative than the median voter to further protect the institution from populist demands.

Meanwhile taxation was structured in such a way that it stimulated investment.39 These reforms were in turn coupled to a policy of centralizing labor market institutions and promoting the increasing concentration of business to ensure trust and cooperation over wages among labor market partners.40 Taken together, these initiatives facilitated an expansionary policy that worked through the supply side of the economy as well as the demand side, while taking the price-stability concerns of business seriously. As Swedish economist Rudolph Meidner said of economic policy in this period, the objective was to “maintain the market economy, to counter short-sighted fluctuations through anti-cyclical policies, and to neutralize its negative effects through fiscal policies.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Two weeks later, after a single face-to-face meeting between Carter and Volcker in the Oval Office and a lightning-fast Senate confirmation, the chairman’s office was filled with the smoke of Volcker’s cheap A&C Grenadier cigars. Not particularly at home in economic matters, Carter was unfamiliar with Volcker’s views in detail. Like every political leader everywhere, the president favored bringing down inflation, but he shared the widespread hope that if the Fed proceeded gradually, it might be able to achieve price stability without putting people out of work—and without endangering the president’s chances of re-election in 1980. The fact that the Fed had tried this approach for more than a decade, without success, did not alter the president’s opinion. Volcker had no such illusions. In a book published in 1978, he had warned of “limits on the ability of demand management to keep the economy at a steady full employment path,” an oblique way of saying that bringing down inflation would cost jobs.

High duties and taxes on coffee, tea, and cocoa beans, in some cases exceeding 60 percent of the value of the product, exemplified the barriers to tropical products; see Appendix, Table D. 20. For an economic discussion of such schemes, see David M. G. Newbery and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Theory of Commodity Price Stabilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), and David G. Gill et al., “Access to Supplies and Resources: Commodity Agreements,” American Society of International Law, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 71 (1977): 129–144. 21. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, The History of UNCTAD 1964–1984 (New York: UNCTAD, 1985), 56–58. 22.

See First National City Bank Clean Air Act, 62 Club of Rome, 57 Coase, Ronald, 107 Cold War, 40–41 collective rationality, 32, 34 Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, 236 Committee for Economic Development, 26 Committee on Banking Regulations and Supervisory Practices, 93 commodity prices: stabilization of, 42–43 commonality: among developing countries, 41 communism, 63 Communist Bloc. See Soviet Bloc communist economies of 1970s: in Soviet Union, 161–162 Communist Party, in France, 201, 203, 204–205, 206, 210. See also political parties computers, 58, 64, 93, 117, 123, 264, 265, 266 concerted action (government and nongovernmental cooperation), 32–34 Congo, 44 conservatism: move to the right and, 10, 155–178 conservative economic policy, 179–182; discretion and, 180; employment and, 179, 180, 182; inflation and, 180–182; rules matter and, 179–180; of Thatcher, Margaret, 182–197.


pages: 305 words: 69,216

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

At this writing, the federal government, in a desperate effort to speed the recovery, has spent or committed to spend (I include the stimulus package now wending its way through Congress, as it seems certain to be enacted) $7.2 trillion ($5.2 trillion by the Federal Reserve, $2 trillion by the Treasury Department), and has guaranteed another $2 trillion in loans and deposits. We are facing the certainty of a huge increase in the national debt and the possibility of a future inflation rate so high that, as in the early 1980s, the Federal Reserve will have to engineer a severe recession (by effecting a sudden sharp increase in interest rates) in order to restore price stability. Such a recession would be an aftershock, and hence a cost, of the present crisis. The aftershock would be all the greater if at the same time that interest rates were rising the government was raising taxes in order to trim an astronomical national debt. And suppose that to reduce the pain of a post-depression recession the Federal Reserve restarted the boom-and-bust cycle by forcing down interest rates.

Had the Federal Reserve caused interest rates to rise, this would have accelerated the bursting of the housing bubble—and then, since no one could be certain that it was a bubble, Congress and the Administration would have been blamed for the fall in home values and the increase in defaults and foreclosures. As long as the Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates just to maintain price stability and avert or soften recessions—raising interest rates to cool economic activity when inflation threatens and lowering them to stimulate economic activity when recession threatens—its actions are relatively uncontroversial and its political independence is therefore unchallenged. If in addition it tried to prick asset bubbles, as by curtailing bank lending when housing prices soar, it would raise political hackles.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Indeed, a subtitle for this book might well have been The Get Rich Slowly but Surely Book. Remember, just to stay even, your investments have to produce a rate of return equal to inflation. Inflation in the United States and throughout most of the developed world fell to 2 percent or below in the early 2000s, and some analysts believe that relative price stability will continue indefinitely. They suggest that inflation is the exception rather than the rule and that historical periods of rapid technological progress and peacetime economies were periods of stable or even falling prices. It may well be that little or no inflation will occur during the decades ahead, but I believe investors should not dismiss the possibility that inflation will accelerate again at some time in the future.

There are at least grains of truth in Bierman’s arguments, and economists today often blame the severity of the 1930s depression on the Federal Reserve for allowing the money supply to decline sharply. Nevertheless, history teaches us that very sharp increases in stock prices are seldom followed by a gradual return to relative price stability. Even if prosperity had continued into the 1930s, stock prices could never have sustained their advance of the late 1920s. In addition, the anomalous behavior of closed-end investment company shares (which I will cover in chapter 15) provides clinching evidence of wide-scale stock-market irrationality during the 1920s.

., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

What made Argentina’s inflation so unmanageable was not war, but the constellation of social forces: the oligarchs, the caudillos, the producers’ interest groups and the trade unions - not forgetting the impoverished underclass or descamizados (literally the shirtless). To put it simply, there was no significant group with an interest in price stability. Owners of capital were attracted to deficits and devaluation; sellers of labour grew accustomed to a wage-price spiral. The gradual shift from financing government deficits domestically to financing them externally meant that bondholding was out-sourced. 64 It is against this background that the failure of successive plans for Argentine currency stabilization must be understood.

In perhaps the most important work of American economic history ever published, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued that it was the Federal Reserve System that bore the primary responsibility for turning the crisis of 1929 into a Great Depression.84 They did not blame the Fed for the bubble itself, arguing that with Benjamin Strong at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York a reasonable balance had been struck between the international obligation of the United States to maintain the restored gold standard and its domestic obligation to maintain price stability. By sterilizing the large gold inflows to the United States (preventing them for generating monetary expansion), the Fed may indeed have prevented the bubble from growing even larger. The New York Fed also responded effectively to the October 1929 panic by conducting large-scale (and unauthorized) open market operations (buying bonds from the financial sector) to inject liquidity into the market.

While American home purchasers in the mid seventies anticipated an inflation rate of at least 12 per cent by 1980, mortgage lenders were offering thirty-year fixed-rate loans at 9 per cent or less.35 For a time, lenders were effectively paying people to borrow their money. Meanwhile, property prices roughly trebled between 1963 and 1979, while consumer prices rose by a factor of just 2.5. But there was a sting in the tail. The same governments that avowed their faith in the ‘property-owning democracy’ also turned out to believe in price stability, or at least lower inflation. Achieving that meant higher interest rates. The unintended consequence was one of the most spectacular booms and busts in the history of the property market. From S&L to Subprime Take a drive along Interstate 30 from Dallas, Texas, and you cannot fail to notice mile after mile of half-built houses and condominiums.


Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

On the one hand, the principle of mutual assistance founded at Bretton Woods has run its course economically and politically. Developed countries have opted out as far as macroeconomic adjustment is concerned. If any principle of co-responsibility takes grounds, it comes from compatible views of price stability in the system of independent central banks. But price stability does not preclude financial imbalances stemming from the vicious circle of credit over-expansion and speculative asset price appreciation. On the other hand, the whole institutional machinery that drives the Fund’s operations is still shaped according to the original philosophy.


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

But this was not enough for the Fed, and the market players were clamoring for more to cope with the downturn. Basically, this desire to help the economy squares well with the task that the Fed has been given by Congress. Unlike most other central banks in the world, the Fed has a duty not only to maintain price stability but also to ensure that the unemployment rate is as low as possible and that long-term interest rates are low. This has made many European politicians view the Fed as a model. What's more, there was concern at the Fed that prices would start falling. One Fed governor who was an expert on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, convinced Greenspan and their colleagues that the country was at risk of entering a deflationary spiral as it had in the 1930s and as Japan had done in the 1990s.

In his description of that "free-bank system," Per Hortlund points out that during the 70 years of its existence, not a single billissuing bank failed, no bill owner lost a krona, and no bank had to shut its windows even for a single day-a "world record for bank stability."" The Swiss economist Peter Bernholz tells us that "a study of about 30 currencies shows that there has not been a single case of a currency freely manipulated by its government or central bank since 1700 that enjoyed price stability for at least 30 years running."" If we chop down the jungle of government support, protection, and requirements, investors and savers will be left to their own devices. That is tough. But thinking for yourself should be tough, because the intellectual exercise it provides will train skills that have lain dormant.


pages: 303 words: 75,192

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

They start by looking for ways to cure disease, then for ways to prevent disease, and may end their quest by searching for the best public health programs to encourage vaccinations or to create safer tap water. The search for deep causes, root causes, may take us in unexpected directions. Governments across rich countries have had widely differing rules about how to run monetary policy: gold standards, pegged exchange rates, vague promises of “price stability,” and many others. And they have different kinds of bureaucracies implementing those policies. Some are about as detached from democracy as an appointed judge, while others work directly for the nation’s prime minister and can be fired at any moment. Once monetary economists started looking into what kinds of government rules and government bureaucracies predicted economic success and which predicted economic tragedy, they found a repeated pattern: the more “independent” the nation’s central bank was from the political process, the better things typically turned out.

They summarize political independence: Whether or not its governor and the board are appointed by the government, the length of their appointments [longer is more independent], whether government representatives sit on the board of the bank [a bad sign], whether government approval for monetary policy decisions is required [another bad sign] and whether the “price stability” objective is explicitly and prominently part of the central bank statute [a good sign—a sign of focus].³ Economic independence is different: it measures whether the central bank is permitted to say “No!” to the government. After all, many nations have been ruined by governments that forced the central bank to lend the government money on easy terms, setting off inflationary and even hyperinflationary spirals.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

These policies focused on minimizing the role of government, emphasizing privatization (selling off government enterprises to the private sector), trade and capital market liberalization (eliminating trade barriers and impediments to the free flow of capital), and deregulation (eliminating regulations on the conduct of business). Government had a role in maintaining macro-stability, but the attention was on price stability rather than on output stability, employment, or growth. There was a large set of dos and don’ts: do privatize everything, from factories to social security; don’t have the government involved in promoting particular industries; do strengthen property rights; don’t be corrupt. Minimizing government meant lowering taxes—but keeping budgets in balance.

If the provinces of China were treated as separate countries—and with populations sometimes in excess of 50 million, they are far larger than most countries around the world—then most of the fastest-growing countries in the world would be in China.6 Importantly, these governments made sure that the benefits of growth did not go just to a few, but were widely shared.7 They focused not only on price stability but on real stability, ensuring that new jobs were created in pace with new entrants to the labor force. Poverty fell dramatically—in Indonesia, for example, the poverty rate (at the $1-a-day standard) fell from 28 percent to 8 percent between 1987 and 20028—while health and life expectancy improved and literacy became close to universal.

As high inflation broke out in many of the countries, the Washington Consensus’s focus on fighting inflation made sense. Their governments had not been working well for them, and the appeal of the Washington Consensus—minimizing the role of government—was understandable. As countries like Argentina adopted the Washington Consensus policies, praise was heaped upon them. When price stability was restored and growth resumed, the World Bank and the IMF claimed credit for the success; the case for the Washington Consensus had been made. But, as it turned out, the growth was not sustainable. It was based on heavy borrowing from abroad and on privatizations which sold off national assets to foreigners—the proceeds from which were not invested.


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

., trading on the E-Mini was paused for five seconds when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”) Stop Logic Functionality was triggered in order to prevent a cascade of further price declines. In that short period of time, sell-side pressure in the E-Mini was partly alleviated and buy-side interest increased. When trading resumed at 2:45:33 p.m., prices stabilized and shortly thereafter, the E-Mini began to recover. When the price of the S&P 500 neared the bottom, its liquidity dried up in the sense that the depth in limit order book almost completely vanished. Furthermore, the liquidity crisis in the S&P 500 spilled over to many other markets, partly because traders were arbitraging the relative mispricings that arose due to the falling S&P 500.

., buying more bonds per month or “tapering” such a purchase program)? To answer these questions, macro traders seek to understand each central bank’s objectives and policy constraints and to analyze the same economic data as the central bank. Central bank objectives differ across countries. In the United States, the Federal Reserve has a “dual mandate” of price stability and maximum employment. This dual mandate can be summarized by saying that the Fed sets the nominal interest rate Rf approximately according to the Taylor rule (Taylor 1993): where the output gap is the “percentage deviation of real GDP from its target,” meaning whether output is above or below its potential.

The Taylor rule is only an approximation of the actual behavior of the Fed, and several other parameter choices and extensions have been suggested, though none perfectly match the Fed’s actual choices. For instance, macro economists have noted that the Fed often acts with a certain amount of inertia, preferring to raise interest rates only gradually. Other central banks, such as the European Central Bank (ECB), have a single objective of price stability, that is, to keep inflation relatively constant (often around 2%). Countries with a pegged exchange rate must also use their monetary policy to achieve the exchange-rate objective, raising interest rates when the currency is falling in value and lowering interest rates when it is rising. Increasingly, central banks also have a financial stability goal.


pages: 369 words: 128,349

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal

3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, junk bonds, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

For example, it is not possible to short-sell initial public offerings (IPOs) for a few days after the issue because shares are not available to borrow. The mispricing, if any, may persist for a few days, until short selling becomes possible. Again in the case of IPOs, the underwriters engage in price stabilization activities that can, in some cases, keep the price at an inflated level for almost a month. A case in point is the spin-off of Palm by 3Com. 3Com sold a fraction of Palm as an IPO in March 2000 but retained 95 percent of its shares. At that time it announced that it would spin off the remaining shares to 3Com shareholders at the rate of 1.5 Palm shares for every 3Com share.

Strategic IPO Underpricing, Information Momentum, and Lockup Expiration Selling. Journal of Financial Economics 66, 105–37. Allen, Franklin and Gerald R. Faulhaber. 1989. Signaling by Underpricing in the IPO Market. Journal of Financial Economics 23(2), 303–24. Asquith, Daniel, Jonathan D. Jones, and Robert Kieschnick. 1998. Evidence on Price Stabilization and Underpricing in Early IPO Returns. Journal of Finance 53(5), 1759–73. Beatty, Randolph P., and Jay R. Ritter. 1986. Investment Banking, Reputation, and the Underpricing of Initial Public Offerings. Journal of Financial Economics 15(1– 2), 213–32. Booth, James R., and Lena Chua. 1996. Ownership Dispersion, Costly Information, and IPO Underpricing.

It is believed that the drift occurs because informed traders break up their orders and spread them over several days to hide their superior information. References for Further Reading Affleck-Graves, John, Shantaram Hegde, and Robert E. Miller. 1996. Conditional Price Trends in the Aftermarket for Initial Public Offerings. Financial Management 25(4), 25–40. Asquith, Daniel, Jonathan D. Jones, and Robert Kieschnick. 1998. Evidence on Price Stabilization and Underpricing in Early IPO Returns. Journal of Finance 53(5), 1759–73. Bradley, D., B. Jordan, and J. Ritter, J. 2003. The Quiet Period Goes out with a Bang. Journal of Finance 58(1), 1–36. Busaba, Walid Y., and Chun Chang. 2002. Bookbuilding vs. Fixed Price Revisited: The Effect of Aftermarket Trading.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

That promise made the second choice, eliminating the difference by September 30, 1981, attractive. Foreign policy obligations would be fulfilled if the deed was done by 1981, late by only one year. The domestic inflation watchers in the government—Schultze, OMB director James McIntrye, and Alfred Kahn, chair of the Council on Wage and Price Stability—opted for either 1981 or 1985. Those who wanted to encourage investment in energy advocated immediate decontrol. Treasury secretary Blumenthal urged complete decontrol on June 1, 1979, the first date possible according to the 1975 law.29 Schlesinger and most of the president’s foreign policy advisers agreed.

Because inflation was not the result of wage increases but of rising prices in key sectors—energy, food, housing, and health care—Marshall argued that limiting wages and prices was not the best way to reduce inflation.45 He was overruled by Schultze.46 The president’s policy was aimed at “the major unions,” which “have to be brought back into line with the rest of the economy,” according to Barry Bosworth, director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability (CWPS), the monitoring agency.47 So the weight of any government wage and price controls fell on the industrial sector, already burdened by energy costs and foreign competition.48 Industrial labor was in the crosshairs of the government’s inflation policy. AFL-CIO head George Meany was incensed.

Business Council Business Roundtable Butler, Landon Butz, Earl Buy American Act Byrd, Robert Caddell, Patrick Calhoun, Michael Califano, Joseph Callaghan, James Canada “Capitol Compact,” Carey, Hugh Carswell, Harrold Carter, Jimmy; auto industry emergency Democratic primaries economic policies energy policy foreign policy and foreign trade industrial policy Iran and labor interests political rise presidential campaigns Castro, Fidel Caterpillar Tractor Center for Political Reform CEO earnings Cheney, Richard Chiles, Lawton China Chirac, Jacques Chisholm, Shirley Chrysler Church, Frank cities, depopulation of Civil Rights Act civil rights movement Clark, Dick Clean Air Act Clifford, Clark Clinton, Bill economic policies education policy and foreign trade governorship health care plan presidential campaign scandals Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy Commodity Futures Modernization Act Common Cause Common Situs Picketing Bill Communism Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) Conable, Barber Congressional Black Caucus Connally, John Continental Oil Contract with America “Contract with America,” Cooper, Richard Cooper-Church Amendment corporate scandals Cost of Living Council Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Council on International Economic Policy (CIEP) Council on Wage and Price Stability (CWPS) Cox, Archibald C. Cranston, Alan Cuba Culver, John Cuomo, Mario dairy industry, U.S. Daley, Richard Darman, Richard Davignon, Étienne Davis, Rennie Deere & Company Deering-Milliken Dees, Morris Defense Logistics Agency Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democratic National Committee (DNC) détente, U.S.


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The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

One of the more significant questions facing all investors is whether a three-decade tail wind for risk assets—due to falling inflation and declining interest rates—could be over, now that the main economic blocks (United States, Europe, Japan) have no inflation and near-zero interest rates. Fiscal deficits, increasing public sector debts, private sector deleveraging, and populist and protectionist politics around the globe all point to increased volatility and a move away from “price stability.” Still, real money accounts have an overwhelming proportion of their portfolio in equity and equity-like investments. The status quo for real money management is no longer tenable. It is not acceptable to obscure losses and volatility behind benchmarks, long-term time horizons, or relative performance numbers.

Quantitative easing is the budgetization of monetary policy—essentially printing money—and the examination of global central bank balance sheets confirms that it is global in scope and massive in scale. We all know that (1) money is ultimately a confidence trick, so policy credibility is very important; and (2) inflation unequivocally erodes savings and capital in the long term, which is one of the main reasons that price stability became such a focal point the past two decades and one of the standards for judging convergence. The credibility and store of value anchors to fiat money are being questioned because the forces known to erode a currency’s purchasing power and confidence are being enacted on such a large scale globally.

For example, the National Bank Act in Switzerland formalized the Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) independence and mandate in the constitution only in 2003, which is frankly like yesterday in the big picture. You could argue that inflation targeting has worked as planned, but that it also led to the crisis of 2008. Because people thought that price stability was here forever, they started levering up, and asset prices exploded. An example where alpha may result from policy change going forward is central banks moving away from inflation targeting, whereby they perhaps target inflation and credit growth. That would generate volatility and change how risk premia are valued.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

The defensive answer from the central banks was that they would off-load the bonds as soon as they could do so without disturbing the market and driving up interest rates. At that point, the market maker argument converged with the second basic justification for their actions—the original argument for QE. They were buying debt to massage the interest rate, and they were entitled to do that because their basic task was to ensure price stability, which in 2020 meant that the economy must be prevented from sliding into deflation. Avoiding deflation meant stimulating demand by all means. For the central bank, that meant holding interest rates down. Once again it came down to financial markets. As far as anyone could figure out, QE worked by driving government bond prices up and yields down.65 Lower interest rates helped to encourage borrowing for investment and consumption.

How would the divergent expectations of the markets and the central bank play out then? 68 If the bond markets believed that the central bank was there to monetize the government deficit, but as prices picked up, the central bank actually withdrew support—as would be indicated by a mandate of price stability, not support of government funding—would interest rates surge? Were these the makings of a shock to come? History suggested that there was reason to worry. In the summer of 2013 Ben Bernanke had rocked bond markets by merely suggesting that the Fed might be thinking about reducing the scale of its third wave of QE.69 In a humiliating climbdown, the Fed had been forced to retreat, but not before the “taper tantrum” had reverberated around the world.

Those calmed nerves in the north of Europe and bought enough political cover to enable the ECB to engage in bond buying as and when necessary.8 By way of justification for its interventions, the ECB offered a variety of pretexts, most commonly the need to guard against a threat to the integrity of the euro area that would put in jeopardy its ability to pursue its primary mandate, which was price stability. The ECB was a central bank with one foot in the 1990s and the other in the twenty-first century. It was a makeshift. It was tested at moments of political tension, as in 2015, when a left-wing Greek government came close to the brink of default, and as in 2018, when a self-proclaimed populist government in Italy challenged the patience of the North.


pages: 80 words: 21,077

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, congestion charging, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, information security, Internet of things, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Skype, smart contracts, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin

The main features of Bitcoin backed cryptocurrency are: • Bitcoin's fixed value is provided by another cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency portfolio. • Binding is done on the chain through smart contracts. • Fixed Bitcoin distribution is regulated within the chain through smart contracts. • Achieve price stability by introducing additional means and incentives as well as collateral. This type of filing coin's technical implementation is more complex and versatile than fiat-based filing lines, increasing the risk of exploitation due to the smart contract code's errors (bugs). Because modems operate in chains, they are not subject to third-party regulations that create decentralized solutions.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

And in fact the studies show more than just a correlation; they explain why a higher degree of economic freedom (that is, a more capitalistic society) causes more prosperity. The seven components of the Fraser Institute’s index (which are virtually identical to those of the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation index) are size of government, extent of government control of markets, degree of price stability, freedom to use foreign currencies, protection of property rights, freedom of international trade, and freedom of capital markets. The overall size of government as a percentage of an economy is important because every dollar that government spends must necessarily come from the private sector.

Why do they throw all that money away by holding prices down? And why are they incapable of stopping oil prices from falling? (During the 2000 presidential election vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press to say that oil and gas prices were too low and that some kind of government “price stabilization program” was needed. At the time, he had just left his position as a top oil industry executive.) The obvious answer to these questions is that the oil companies do not have the price-fixing powers that the mainstream media—and anticapitalist intellectuals—ascribe to them. Nevertheless, regulation has become a reality in the energy industry.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

A governor of the Bank of England (a private company at that time) was being questioned by the British Parliament: “Can you please inform us about how much gold there is at the Bank of England?” “In ample sufficiency, Sir.” “Can you be more precise?” “No, Sir.” 5. L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1998), viii–ix. 6. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: William Morrow, 2005), 15. 7. Eric Beinhocker, The Origins of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

“Public Attitude towards Climate Change: Findings from a Multi- Country Poll.” World Development Report 1020: Development and Climate Change. http://siteresources.worldbank.org /INTWDR2010 /Resources/Background-report.pdf. Wray, L. Randall. Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability. Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. Yee, Lee Chyen, and Jim, Clare. “Foxconn to Rely More on Robots; Could Use 1 Million in 3 Years. Reuters News Agency, August 1, 2011. http://www .reuters.com /article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUST RE77016 B20110801.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Even in those uncertain days, there was plenty of comment about federal deficits, but soon the policy focus would swing back to inflation. The Fed under Chairman Martin consistently maintained support for price stability. This task was made easier by the election of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and the fact that inflation moderated during his two terms in office. As Hertzel concluded: “Under Chairman Martin, the Fed’s overriding goals became price stability and macroeconomic stability.”11 There were also new calls for greater federal involvement in areas such as housing. In 1950, for example, the Truman Administration explicitly focused on housing as a key area of private investment, but with federal guarantees for the debt used to finance home purchases.

In fact the relentless rate squeeze by the Fed and a lot of positively coincidental and mostly external trends broke the inflation in the United States, but did not really instill fiscal sobriety. But Paul Volcker broke the momentum of inflation and also took sufficient demand out of the economy to give the crucial impression of price stability. The underlying rate of inflation, represented by internal prices in the United States and the value of the dollar, remained high enough so that, in real terms, the cost of energy and particularly oil dropped for almost two decades to the end of the twentieth century. While the dollar rallied sharply from 1980 through 1985 because of the towering interest rate regime imposed by Volcker and the resulting rebound in U.S. standing with global investors, the overall trend continued to be one of steady inflation of the dollar and decreased purchasing power for U.S. consumers—except in the case of oil.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Carbon markets required years to be built;12 volatility markets exist in large part as a function of abstract financial models;13 and even the most basic markets require intricate design.14 Under neoliberalism, the state therefore takes on a significant role in creating ‘natural’ markets. The state also has an important role in sustaining these markets – neoliberalism demands that the state defend property rights, enforce contracts, impose anti-trust laws, repress social dissent and maintain price stability at all costs. This latter demand, in particular, has greatly expanded in the wake of the 2008 crisis into the full-spectrum management of monetary issues through central banks. We therefore make a grave mistake if we think the neoliberal state is intended simply to step back from markets. The unprecedented interventions by central banks into financial markets are symptomatic not of the neoliberal state’s collapse, but of its central function: to create and sustain markets at all costs.15 Yet it has been an arduous and winding path from neoliberalism’s origins to the present, in which its ideas hold sway over those injecting trillions of dollars into the market.

Numerous members of what would become Thatcher’s administration passed through the IEA during the 1960s and 1970s.40 The outcome of the IEA’s efforts was not only to subtly transform the economic discourse in Britain, but also to naturalise two particular policies: the necessity of attacking trade union power, and the imperative of monetary stability. The former would purportedly let markets freely adapt to changing economic circumstances, while the latter would provide the basic price stability needed for a healthy capitalist economy. In the United States, too, think tanks and academic research groups were built to push for a broadly neoliberal agenda, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute being two of the most notable.41 The MIPR aimed to redefine political common sense by writing books on neoliberal economics that were intended for a popular audience, some of which eventually sold over 500,000 copies.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Moreover, prices, and especially wages, respond slowly to changes in supply and demand, resulting in periodic shortages and surpluses, especially of labour. Keynes asserted that free markets have no self-balancing mechanisms to counter this and achieve full employment, and therefore justified government intervention through public policies that aim to achieve full employment and price stability. Keynes’ ideas became widely accepted after the Second World War and provided the main inspiration for economic policy makers in Western industrialised countries. However, Keynesian economics began to fall out of favour in the 1970s as many economies experienced slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising inflation, a phenomenon which is often referred to as stagflation.

‘Increasing Investment in Affordable Housing: Towards a Level Playing Field for Affordable Housing’. Capital Economics, 3 April. Chang, Ha-Joon. 2007. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury. Cheshire, Paul. 2009. ‘Urban Containment, Housing Affordability and Price Stability-Irreconcilable Goals’. Cheshire, Paul. 2011. House of Commons CLG Select Committee, 10 October. Cheshire, Paul C. 2013. ‘Land Market Regulation: Market versus Policy Failures’. Journal of Property Research 30 (3): 170–88. Cheshire, Paul. 2014. ‘Turning Houses into Gold: The Failure of British Planning’.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Even in our model economy of only seven goods and services plus the monetary asset, it will now be extremely difficult for the money producer to inject precisely enough money to keep the agreed-upon statistical average stable or, as is more common today, to keep it advancing at a steady pace of, say, 2 percent per annum. In a modern economy with millions of goods and services and ongoing changes in preferences and in economic conditions, initiated by innovation and entrepreneurial activity, the task is even more difficult. Defenders of paper money and price stabilization will argue that the money producer can still identify certain trends in such variables as economic growth and wealth and, therefore, in money demand. If only the money producer forecasts these trends correctly, he stands a good chance of achieving stability over the medium to long term. Most inflation-targeting central banks today allow for a certain amount of near-term volatility around their aimed-at inflation rate, anyway.

See also money, paper money individualism industrial commodities Industrial Revolution inelastic money inelastic, elastic versus inflation commodity money and paper money and inflationary meltdown inflationism international policy coordination and interest interest rates rising international capital flows international market exchange International Monetary Fund (IMF) interventionism investing investment activity J Jackson, Andrew Jacobson Schwartz, Anna Jefferson, Thomas Jevons, William Stanley Jin Dynasty K Keynes, John Maynard Keynesianism Keynesians L laissez-faire Law, John Lehman Brothers lender of last resort lending activity, money as enhancer liquidity, tightening loan market, money injection via Long Term Capital Management M macroeconomics political appeal of problems with Malthus, Robert market economy Marx, Karl Massachusetts, paper money and medium of exchange money as multiple supply meltdown, inflationary Menger, Carl Mill, James Ming Dynasty misallocation of capital Mises, Ludwig von Monetarism monetary base monetary crisis theory Monetary History of the United States monetary intervention monetary policy Monetary Regimes and Inflation monetary stability, price level and monetization, of debt of government debt money as enhancer of lending activity bank versus individual ownership demand for evolution of functions of nationalization of origin of ownership of purpose of money balances money creation money demand money supply without wealth demand versus money injections even and nontransparent even, instant, and transparent price stability and uneven and nontransparent via loan market money production cost other goods versus money supply controlling expanding money demand without relative prices and N Napoleonic Wars NASDAQ nationalization, credit and money Neoclassical School of Economics New Deal Nixon, Richard M.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Political scientists talk about “democratic delegation”—the idea that a sovereign might want to tie its hands (through international commitments or delegation to autonomous agencies) in order to achieve better outcomes. The delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank is the archetypal example: in the service of price stability, daily management of monetary policy is insulated from politics. However, even if selective limitations on sovereignty may enhance democratic performance, there is no guarantee that all limitations implied by market integration would do so. In domestic politics, delegation is carefully calibrated and restricted to a few areas where the issues tend to be highly technical and partisan differences are not large.

The linchpin of Argentina’s economic strategy after 1991 was the convertibility law, which legally anchored the peso to the US dollar at a one-to-one exchange rate and prohibited restrictions on capital flows. Argentine economy minister Domingo Cavallo had envisioned the convertibility law as both a harness and an engine for the economy. The strategy worked well initially by bringing much-needed price stability. But, by the end of the decade, the Argentine nightmare had returned with a vengeance. The Asian financial crisis and the Brazilian devaluation in early 1999 left the Argentinean peso looking decidedly overvalued. Doubts about Argentina’s ability to service its external debt multiplied, confidence collapsed, and before too long, Argentina’s creditworthiness slid below that of some African countries.


High-Frequency Trading by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado, Maureen O'Hara

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, computer vision, continuous double auction, dark matter, discrete time, finite state, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Large Hadron Collider, latency arbitrage, margin call, market design, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, National best bid and offer, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Tobin tax, transaction costs, two-sided market, yield curve

There is definite empirical evidence of the path dependency of the price trajectory; a black swan event may be triggered at any time due to microstructure effects that are not linked to fundamental factors. Organised trading venues are exploring ways to prevent microstructure effects distorting price action, though without reaching a satisfactory solution so far. This chapter proposes a new method to achieve price stability. We suggest that the queuing system of limit order books rewards market participants by offering competitive two-way prices; model simulations presented here indicate that this might well enhance market stability. THE CURRENCY MARKET This section describes the currency market from a high-frequency trading (HFT) perspective.

Market-making strategies are designed to offer temporary liquidity to the market by posting bid and ask prices with the expectation of earning the bid and ask spread to compensate for losses from adverse price moves. In some trading venues, these types of strategies are incentivised with rebate schemes or reduced transactions fees. We shall explain later (see pp. 80ff) how such incentives can be used to make price discovery more robust and contribute to price stability. Statistical arbitrage strategies are a class of strategies that take advantage of deviations from statistically significant market relationships. These relationships can, for example, be market patterns that have been observed to occur with some reasonable likelihood. Mean reversion strategies assume that the price movement does not persist in one direction and will eventually revert and bounce back.


pages: 318 words: 87,570

Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio by Sal Arnuk, Joseph Saluzzi

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Gordon Gekko, High speed trading, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, National best bid and offer, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, Sergey Aleynikov, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, zero-sum game

., trading on the E-Mini was paused for five seconds when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Stop Logic Functionality was triggered in order to prevent a cascade of further price declines. In that short period of time, sell-side pressure in the E-Mini was partly alleviated and buy-side interest increased. When trading resumed at 2:45:33 p.m., prices stabilized and shortly thereafter, the E-Mini began to recover, followed by the SPY.” After this trading pause in the futures market, the final report said, firms had “time to react and verify the integrity of their data and systems, buy-side and sell-side interest returned and an orderly price discovery process began to function.”

Some estimates are that these traders enter anywhere from several hundred to one million orders for every 100 trades they actually execute. This has significantly raised the bar for all firms on Wall Street to invest in computers, storage, and routing to handle all the message traffic. 3. NYSE specialists no longer provide price stability. With the advent NYSE Hybrid, specialist market share has dropped from 80% to 25%. With specialists out of the way, the floodgates have been opened to high frequency traders who find it easier to make money with more liquid listed shares. 4. Volatility has skyrocketed. The markets’ average daily price swing year to date is approximately 4% versus 1% last year.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

William Miller, who sometimes laughed so hard at his own jokes that he couldn’t get to the punch line, and who passionately expressed a determination to stimulate job creation, particularly for minorities.32 Democrats also sought to write Keynesian economics more firmly into law by passing the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which enshrined “full employment” and “reasonable price stability” as the goals of fiscal and monetary policy. For proponents of activist economics, it seemed like a second sunrise, and they confidently predicted an economic revival. Instead it was the final act of the Keynesian era. Inflation rose inexorably during Carter’s first two years. Then the Iranian revolution sparked a second oil crisis and prices rose faster.

Germany and France had similar inflation in the late 1980s, but interest rates remained significantly higher on French government debt. The head of the Bundesbank, Karl Otto Pöhl, told one of New Zealand’s scouting parties that the explanation was simple: “Savers don’t yet know whether they can trust those French bastards.”91 In December 1989, New Zealand passed a law making price stability the sole responsibility of its central bank, sweeping away a 1964 law that, characteristically for its time, had instructed the central bank to pursue a laundry list of goals including economic growth, employment, social welfare, and trade promotion. The man picked to lead New Zealand’s experiment was an economist named Don Brash, who ran one of the nation’s largest banks and then one of its largest trade groups, the Kiwifruit Authority.92 His job description was simple: deliver inflation between 0 percent and 2 percent.

The man picked to lead New Zealand’s experiment was an economist named Don Brash, who ran one of the nation’s largest banks and then one of its largest trade groups, the Kiwifruit Authority.92 His job description was simple: deliver inflation between 0 percent and 2 percent. If he failed, he could be fired.93 Brash was a believer in price stability. After reading Milton and Rose Friedman’s 1980 book, Free to Choose, which he described as “enormously influential” in shaping his views, he had invited the Friedmans to visit New Zealand for a speaking tour and escorted them around the country.94 In his new role, Brash made his own speaking tour, appearing before any group willing to listen.


How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D. Schiff, Andrew J. Schiff

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business climate, currency peg, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, price stability, Robert Shiller, technology bubble

It was thought that such movements could hold prices steady through good times and bad. Even if such a mission were a good idea to begin with, it’s easy to see that the Fed has utterly failed in accomplishing it. Over the past 100 years, the dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its value. So much for price stability! The truth is that the Fed now exists for the sole purpose of providing the inflation necessary to allow the government to spend more than it collects in taxes. During the Depression, President Roosevelt decided to devalue the dollar against gold. In order to pull this off, the government had to control the entire gold market, and for a time the government made it illegal to own gold coins.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

In the case of government money, on the other hand, the money supply increases through the expansion of the supply by the central bank and commercial banks, and contracts through deflationary recessions and bankruptcies, while the demand for money can vary even more unpredictably depending on people's expectations of the value of the money and the policies of the central bank. This highly volatile combination results in government money being unpredictable in value over the long term. Central banks' mission of ensuring price stability has them constantly managing the supply of money through their various tools to ensure price stability, making many major currencies appear less volatile in the short run compared to gold. But in the long run, the constant increase in the supply of government money compared to gold's steady and slow increase makes gold's value more predictable.


pages: 368 words: 32,950

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile by Alexander Davidson

accounting loophole / creative accounting, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Exxon Valdez, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, information security, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, pension reform, Piper Alpha, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk free rate, shareholder value, short selling, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The Bank of England Act 1998, transferred responsibility for authorising the banks and supervision of the banking system from the Bank of England to the Financial Services Authority (FSA), a new single statutory regulator for the financial services industry. The Bank has retained responsibility for the stability of the banking system. Role today The Bank is responsible for the overall stability of the UK financial markets, and maintaining price stability. It also manages the UK’s gold and currency reserves on behalf of HM Treasury. The Bank can intervene in the money markets and, in accordance with government policy, occasionally in the foreign exchange market. It also oversees payment and settlement services under the Settlement Finality Directive adopted in May 1998.

By this move, which meant independence for the central bank, the Labour Government answered concerns that government had a political agenda and so should not be given responsibility for setting interest rates and addressing inflation. Inflation targeting The chancellor, acting for the Treasury, defines price stability and sets the annual inflation target, and the Bank has the task of keeping inflation at the target set by the government. Its tool is the power to change the repo rate. This is the short-term rate at which the Bank of England lends to banks for repurchase agreements. It is for practical purposes synonymous with the term base rate.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

The Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun claimed that 'God created the two precious metals, gold and silver, to serve as a measure of all commodities.. .' Without further need for intervention by any religious institution, gold and silver remained symbolically associated respectively with the sun and moon. For centuries, their prices stabilized mysteriously in a fixed ratio of 1/13.5, astrologically determined to reflect the heavenly cycles. These two metals remained divinely ordained currencies after the astrological justification was long forgotten. There are many people who, to this day, claim that 'real' money would be a return to the gold standard.

Each government participating in the EMU is giving the levers of control over the euro money supply to the European Central Bank. The ECB will by definition be less responsive to the requirements of any one country's unemployment situation. 2. The Maastricht Treaty gives the ECB a single objective: to ensure price stability. Full employment is specifically not one of its official priorities. 3. Finally, the only other traditional tool available - the fiscal one has similarly been put under severe constraints. The maximum limit of 3% of government deficit financing is supposed to be a permanent one and most governments are adopting the euro with their spending at or dose to this straitjacket target limit.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

It had been important in allowing the large increase in military spending to fight World War II and later to counter the Soviet challenge. In the years after World War II, the US Federal Reserve Bank had been instructed, by the Full Employment Act of Congress of 1948, to promote, as one of its objectives, “maximum employment, production, and purchasing power,” while paying attention to price stability. Because by 1948 public spending in the United States had collapsed to 11.6 percent of GDP, there was great concern among Keynesian economists that the Great Depression would return. The confidence that some economists have in the existence of the aforementioned two “free lunches” in today’s economies has made it possible to call for large increases in public spending both in the United States and in European countries, in the belief that these increases can be achieved at almost zero costs, while producing great benefits by injecting needed demand in economies facing “great stagnation.”

The important goals, besides the stabilization of national income at full employment, were the elimination or reduction of economic risks for citizens; some 50 Termites of the State redistribution of income, in order to achieve a more equitable income distribution; and the maintenance of growth and price stability. These goals were to be achieved with the recently discovered Keynesian countercyclical policies, with the help of new social programs, and with progressive tax systems, while allowing the economies to continue working as significantly free market economies. Some of the political wishes, such as those mentioned in the Beveridge Report of 1942 and in Roosevelt’s fireside chat of 1944, became government promises, and the promises were slowly transformed into concrete policies that created “entitlements” or “bills of rights” for citizens.

Over the years, several authors, including Buchanan, Alesina, von Hagen, Poterba, Tabellini, and Persson, have argued that political arrangements such as fiscal federalism and fiscal decentralization; proportional or nonproportional representation by political parties in parliaments; the frequency of elections; the choice of presidential versus nonpresidential types of governments; the role and power of the ministry of finance compared to those of spending ministries; the rules that apply to the budgetary process – for example, whether it starts with top-down macroeconomic constraints, which reflect a collective view on priorities, or whether it allows a bottom-up process, by which pressures for spending are determined through the political influence of different ministers – whether parliaments can modify the content of budgetary proposals or whether they must vote on the whole budget; whether the central bank is truly independent; whether its mandate relates only to the maintenance of price stability or involves other objectives, such as employment, financial stability, assistance in the financing of governments, and so on – all of these arrangements have a significant impact on fiscal and macroeconomic outcomes. Various situations have been modeled, often using strong assumptions and sophisticated game theories, and have also been subjected to empirical testing (see, inter alia, Tabellini and Persson, 2000; Poterba and von Hagen, 1999).


Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David Aronson

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, Black Swan, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mental accounting, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, retrograde motion, revision control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Sharpe ratio, short selling, source of truth, statistical model, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, systematic trading, the scientific method, transfer pricing, unbiased observer, yield curve, Yogi Berra

One story that has been making the rounds since the 1950s is as follows: “The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Declaration of Independence has 300 words, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has 266 words, but a directive from the government’s Office of Price Stabilization to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.” The truth is the Office of Price Stability never made such a directive. Nevertheless, the tale had such appeal, it remained alive despite the agency’s efforts to convince the public it was false. Even the dissolution of the Office of Price Stability did not stop the story. It was merely modified so that the directive was described as a “federal directive.”64 The story would not die because of its irony and the plausibility of long-winded bureaucrats.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

“If we spent a million dollars a day every day since the birth of Christ, we wouldn’t get to $1 trillion,” said Congressman Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House government oversight committee. “And we’re likely to lose far more than that.” But we didn’t. Our outcomes were not in line with the experience of other nations, in past crises or this crisis. They were much better. By that summer, we had not only averted a depression, our economy had started growing again. House prices stabilized. Credit markets thawed. And our emergency investments would literally pay off for taxpayers. Most Americans still believe we threw away billions or even trillions of their hard-earned dollars to bail out greedy banks. In fact, the financial system repaid all our assistance, and U.S. taxpayers have turned a profit from our crisis response, including our investments in all five of those financial bombs.

THE TRAJECTORY of the economy continued to improve for the rest of 2009, which is to say it shed jobs less rapidly—down to about two hundred thousand a month for September and October, averaging less than one hundred thousand a month in November and December. The economy actually began growing again in the summer, and expanded at an impressive 3.9 percent clip in the fourth quarter. Home prices stabilized. In December, Bank of America and Wells Fargo fully repaid their TARP funds, and even Citigroup paid us back most of what they owed; by year’s end, we had recouped about two-thirds of the federal outlays for bank rescues. I was finally confident that the U.S. portion of the financial crisis was over.

The most important thing we did to stop the slide, other than our efforts to arrest the broader economic and financial free fall, was to stabilize Fannie and Freddie so that mortgage credit could keep flowing at a time when private capital was fleeing the sector. Even with unemployment rising and defaults increasing, home prices stabilized in mid-2009, and gradually began to rise in the following years. The end of the real estate slump helped avoid further damage to the typical family’s largest source of wealth and savings, and was critical to restoring the economy to growth. It wouldn’t have happened without our $400 billion lifeline for Fannie and Freddie.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

He and his economist peers, who had recently all obtained their graduate degrees and started their first jobs, “were acutely aware of the timing of this turn of the tide,… and almost immediately found our graduate school education incapable of explaining the evolution of the economy.”18 Economic advisers to both Johnson and, before him, President John F. Kennedy had argued that a substantial reduction in unemployment could be achieved with only a moderate increase in inflation. But expectations of inflation became “unanchored.” Prices and wages were not set to an expectation of price stability, or even to a slow upward creep in inflation, but rather to last year’s inflation, which had become the new normal. Over the four years from 1965 to 1969, the Federal Reserve accommodated President Johnson’s desire to reduce unemployment by expanding the money supply, to keep interest rates low, and then Vietnam War spending unbalanced by higher taxes overheated the economy further.

This, in turn, encouraged workers to be insufficiently differential, and to demand too-high wages, spurring inflation, which kept profits too low to justify investment. And since it promised to reward even those who had not pleased previous employers with jobs, it undermined public virtue. The government and Federal Reserve needed to impose discipline by focusing on price stability, the right-wingers insisted, and then let the unemployment rate go wherever it needed to go. Government couldn’t be a “nanny state” offering everybody a bottle when they cried. Monetary policy needed to be turned over to strongly anti-inflationary policy makers—as Jimmy Carter had already done, half- or unwittingly, in turning the Federal Reserve over to Paul Volcker.

Barrie Wigmore and Peter Temin, “The End of One Big Deflation,” MIT Department of Economics working paper 503, 1988, https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63586/endofonebigdefla00temi.pdf; Thomas Sargent, “Stopping Moderate Inflations: The Methods of Poincaré and Thatcher,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, working paper W, May 1981, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.28111603; Laurence Ball, “The Genesis of Inflation and the Costs of Disinflation,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 23, no. 3, Part 2: Price Stability (August 1991): 439–452. 17. Laurence Ball, “What Determines the Sacrifice Ratio?,” in Monetary Policy, ed. N. Gregory Mankiw, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 155–194. 18. Martin Feldstein, “The Dollar and the Trade Deficit in the 1980s: A Personal View,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper 4325, issue date April 1993, available at NBER, www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w4325/w4325.pdf. 19.


pages: 464 words: 117,495

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management by Alexander Elder

additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, computerized trading, deliberate practice, diversification, Elliott wave, endowment effect, fear index, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, price stability, psychological pricing, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, short selling, South Sea Bubble, systematic trading, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, tulip mania, zero-sum game

The lower tops reflect a gradual weakening of the uptrend with the passage of time. In order to count as a divergence, MACD-Histogram has to cross and recross its zero line. Bearish divergences occur in uptrends—they identify market tops. A classical bearish divergence occurs when prices reach a new high and then pull back, with an oscillator dropping below its zero line. Prices stabilize and rally to a higher high, but an oscillator reaches a lower peak than it did on a previous rally. Such bearish divergences usually lead to sharp breaks. A bearish divergence shows that bulls are running out of steam, prices are rising out of inertia, and bears are ready to take control. Valid divergences are clearly visible—they seem to jump at you from the charts.

In the heady atmosphere of a bull market, Ford seemed to have a shot at recapturing its $30 high. I saw a false downside breakout coupled with a bullish divergence and bought. I then grimly held through the bear market. 2011—Ford spiked above its monthly channel, which was narrower at that time, tracing a kangaroo tail, while monthly MACD weakened. I took profits. 2011—as monthly prices stabilized in their value zone, I repurchased my position. Fundamental analysis can help you find a stock that may be worth buying. Use technical analysis to time your entries and exits. Be prepared to buy and sell more than once during a major uptrend. Swing Trading While major trends and trading ranges can last for years, all are punctuated by short-term upswings and downswings.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Indeed, a subtitle for this book might well have been The Get Rich Slowly but Surely Book. Remember, just to stay even, your investments have to produce a rate of return equal to inflation. Inflation in the United States and throughout most of the developed world fell to the 2 percent level in the early 2000s, and some analysts believe that relative price stability will continue indefinitely. They suggest that inflation is the exception rather than the rule and that historical periods of rapid technological progress and peacetime economies were periods of stable or even falling prices. It may well be that little or no inflation will occur during the first decades of the twenty-first century, but I believe investors should not dismiss the possibility that inflation will accelerate again at some time in the future.

There are at least grains of truth in Bierman’s arguments, and economists today often blame the severity of the 1930s depression on the Federal Reserve for allowing the money supply to decline sharply. Nevertheless, history teaches us that very sharp increases in stock prices are seldom followed by a gradual return to relative price stability. Even if prosperity had continued into the 1930s, stock prices could never have sustained their advance of the late 1920s. In addition, the anomalous behavior of closed-end investment company shares (which I will cover in chapter 15) provides clinching evidence of wide-scale stock-market irrationality during the 1920s.


pages: 376 words: 118,542

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

For example, in one massive building in Washington some government employees are working full-time trying to devise and implement plans to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. In another massive building, perhaps miles away from the first, other employees, equally dedicated, equally hard-working, are working full-time spending our money to subsidize farmers to grow tobacco. In one building the Council on Wage and Price Stability is working overtime trying to persuade, pressure, hornswoggle businessmen to hold down prices and workers to restrain their wage demands. In another building some subordinate agencies in the Department of Agriculture are administering programs to keep up, or raise, the prices of sugar, cotton, and numerous other agricultural products.

Anyone who has been subjected to a thorough customs inspection on returning from a trip abroad, had his tax returns audited by the Internal Revenue Service, been subject to inspection by an official of OSHA or any of a large number of federal agencies, had occasion to appeal to the bureaucracy for a ruling or a permit, or had to defend a higher price or wage before the Council on Wage and Price Stability is aware of how far we have come from a rule of law. The government official is supposed to be our servant. When you sit across the desk from a representative of the Internal Revenue Service who is auditing your tax return, which one of you is the master and which the servant? Or to use a different illustration.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

One is by the broad division of their portfolio; they are “balanced funds” if they have a significant (generally about one-third) component of bonds, or “stock-funds” if their holdings are nearly all common stocks. (There are some other varieties here, such as “bond funds,” “hedge funds,” “letter-stock funds,” etc.)* Another is by their objectives, as their primary aim is for income, price stability, or capital appreciation (“growth”). Another distinction is by their method of sale. “Load funds” add a selling charge (generally about 9% of asset value on minimum purchases) to the value before charge.1 Others, known as “no-load” funds, make no such charge; the managements are content with the usual investment-counsel fees for handling the capital.

The market record of the public-utility indexes—condensed in Table 14-6, along with those of other groups—indicates that there have been ample possibilities of profit in these investments in the past. While the rise has not been as great as in the industrial index, the individual utilities have shown more price stability in most periods than have other groups.* It is striking to observe in this table that the relative price/earnings ratios of the industrials and the utilities have changed places during the past two decades. These reversals will have more meaning for the active than for the passive investor. But they suggest that even defensive portfolios should be changed from time to time, especially if the securities purchased have an apparently excessive advance and can be replaced by issues much more reasonably priced.

Finally we should comment on the much poorer showing made by our lists as a whole as compared with the price record of the S & P composite. The latter is weighted by the size of each enterprise, whereas our tests are based on taking one share of each company. Evidently the larger emphasis given to giant enterprises by the S & P method made a significant difference in the results, and points up once again their greater price stability as compared with “run-of-the-mine” companies. Bargain Issues, or Net-Current-Asset Stocks In the tests discussed above we did not include the results of buying 30 issues at a price less than their net-current-asset value. The reason was that only a handful, at most, of such issues would have been found in the Stock Guide at the end of 1968.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

A real Ponzi scheme takes fraud; Bitcoin, by contrast, seems more like a collective delusion.”36 Viewed simply as a currency, Bitcoin’s biggest pitfall is likely to be price deflation (and, in extremis, hyperdeflation), not inflation. This would be the conclusion reached about Bitcoin from the perspective of modern monetary theory, as discussed in Chapter 3. As the blogger “Lord Keynes” notes, “without relative price stability and an elastic supply, Bitcoins are not a viable monetary unit for any large capitalist system.”37 Although almost every monetary scholar would agree with the point about price stability, those of a more “Austrian” persuasion—not to mention the designers of Bitcoin themselves—would disagree about elastic supply: the Bitcoin software is designed to avoid such elasticity, which is regarded as a weakness of the fiat monetary system.

In its practical design, however, the Eurozone was made to conform as far as possible to the classical view of money reflected in Schumpeter’s remarks as quoted above: namely, as a thing that operates purely on the basis of rational self-interest. For example, the European Central Bank was directed to focus on the purely technical question of price stability, free from cultural or political considerations. The ideal of a one-size-fits-all monetary policy applicable to all member states seemed entirely in keeping with this sanitized view of money as a culturally neutral landscape. If the euro was implicitly culturalist in its aspirations, then, it was dogmatically Mengerian in its design.


State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

There is another respect in which good governance and democracy are not so easily separated. A good state institution is one that transparently and efficiently serves the needs of its clients—the citizens of the state. In areas like monetary policy, the goals of policy are relatively straightforward (that is price stability) and can be met by relatively detached tech- the missing dimensions of stateness 27 nocrats. Hence central banks are constructed in ways that deliberately shield them from short-term democratic political pressure. In other sectors like primary and secondary education, the quality of the public agency’s output greatly depends on the feedback it receives from the ultimate consumers of government services.


pages: 482 words: 125,973

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

Though it may take some time, this lesson to the aggressive rival is likely to curb its tendency to offer discounts in the future. Any selective response designed to keep better customers while letting the marginal ones escape will have similar effects. An industry whose firms are equipped to meet price cutting with selective responses should enjoy greater price stability than industries where firms cannot be selective. The other side of the coin is that selectivity can be an offensive tool as well, and companies that can poach their rivals’ best customers are going to do so, and thus encourage price competition. Selectivity can take a second form. Companies responding to aggressive price behavior should pick their spots.

If the competitor responds, it, and not the incumbent, bears the disproportionate costs of the price war. Indeed, it may even be worthwhile to introduce—or threaten to introduce—a new product into a competitor’s market solely for the purpose of letting the competitor know how painful price wars can be. What should be kept in mind is that attacking rivals is a tactic whose goal is to restore price stability and enhance industry cooperation, not an end in itself. Like many things of value, cooperative arrangements are easier to break than to mend. The second component of a tactical adjustment in a prisoner’s dilemma situation, signaling for a joint return to higher prices, is difficult to accomplish.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Thus the generation-long ascendancy of financial capital has expressed itself in a preference for a monetarist or Friedmanite definition of full employment, one in which the dangers of inflation have been oversold at the expense of the unemployed, wage-earners, and industry too. Even now, in what is if anything a deflationary climate, an unreasoning fear of inflation dominates public debate. In 1978, Congress made it an explicit purpose of the Federal Reserve to promote full employment, as well as price stability. (The European Central Bank, by contrast, is tasked only with stabilizing prices.) The goal of full employment is inscribed in our financial system. It should now become a political demand with which to counter efforts by the Obama administration and congressional Republicans to fight mass unemployment by means of tax credits for employers.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Notes Index List of Figures 1.1UK net worth by type, 2016 (£ billion) (Source: Office for National Statistics) 1.2UK net worth by type, 1995–2016 (Source: Office for National Statistics) 2.1References to ‘surplus land’ and ‘surplus property’ in UK Parliament, by decade (Source: Hansard) 2.2Approximate shares of British landownership by area, late 1970s (Source: Author) 4.1Current public-land disclosure initiatives (England and Wales, except otherwise stated) (Source: Author) 5.1Net annual sales of Forestry Commission land, 1982–2015 (Source: Forestry Commission) 5.2Estimated public landownership in contemporary Britain by area (thousand hectares) (Source: Author) 5.3Capacity of disposed land vs. unimplemented permissions (Source: Local Government Association; National Audit Office) 5.4UK real land and house price indices, 1892–2008 (Source: P. Cheshire, ‘Urban Containment, Housing Affordability and Price Stability – Irreconcilable Goals’, SERC Policy Paper 4, 2009, p. 9, at eprints.lse.ac.uk) 5.5UK annual housing rental payments, 1985–2015 (Source: Office for National Statistics) 5.6UK real estate sector: gross value added by sub-category, 2005 and 2014 (Source: Office for National Statistics) 5.7UK private non-financial corporations: operating surplus, 1998–2014 (Source: Office for National Statistics) List of Abbreviations ASI Adam Smith Institute BLP Berwin Leighton Paisner BRB British Railways Board BTC British Transport Commission CABE Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment CPS Centre for Policy Studies CLT Community land trust DCLG Department for Communities and Local Government DEFRA Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs DHSS Department of Health and Social Security EFA Education Funding Agency FTE Full-time employee GLA Greater London Authority GLC Greater London Council GPA Government Property Agency GPU Government Property Unit GVA Gross value added HCA Homes and Communities Agency HDV Haringey Development Vehicle IEA Institute of Economic Affairs IFRS International Financial Reporting Standards IPPR Institute for Public Policy Research LCC London City Council LGA Local Government Association LSA Land Settlement Association MoD Ministry of Defence MoJ Ministry of Justice NAO National Audit Office NEF New Economics Foundation NHS National Health Service OFT Office of Fair Trading OGC Office of Government Commerce ONS Office for National Statistics PACE Property Advisers to the Civil Estate PLI Public Land Initiative PRS Property Repayment Services PSA Property Services Agency PSC People with Significant Control register RBS Royal Bank of Scotland RIFW Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales RLA Redundant Lands and Accommodation Acknowledgements My first and most important thanks are to my family: Agneta, Elliot, Oliver and Emilia.

Extreme volatility in land prices, needless to say, does not make for smooth economic planning and management. As the IPPR researchers observed, volatility in land and housing markets is ‘intimately connected to instability in the economy as a whole’.3 Figure 5.4 UK real land and house price indices, 1892-2008 Source: P. Cheshire, ‘Urban Containment, Housing Affordability and Price Stability – Irreconcilable Goals’, SERC Policy Paper 4, 2009, p. 9, at eprints.lse.ac.uk The second, connected, phenomenon reflecting and transmitting inefficiencies in the land market is clearly unproductive allocations of land – ‘misallocations’, one might call them. Research carried out in 2012 for the mayor of London by the development analysts Molior, for instance, found that, in London, nearly half of unimplemented residential planning permissions were in the hands of ‘non-builders’ (‘firms that we cannot see building a scheme themselves’, such as investment companies and the like), and that the latter controlled 55 per cent of the planning pipeline.4 Such speculative holding can be described as many things, but ‘highest and best use’ of the land is obviously not one of them.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

For instance, a sudden housing price acceleration such as the one that occurred in the early 1970s is now extremely unlikely. All prices were rising rapidly then: not just housing, but wages as well. In contrast, housing price falls in the near future would not be remarkable given the general direction of the long-term trends and the falls in both the 1990s and the last decade. The long-term trend is toward price stability, back toward negligible quarterly change. How on earth is it possible, given how much housing prices have risen in recent decades, to say that the rise is slowing? Well, there are at least two ways to look at this. First, in 2017, 2018, and 2019, the U.K. housing market clearly slowed down, however it is graphed.

Before we return to the subject of house prices, consider something a little different—gold. In figure 52 the gold price timeline has not been adjusted for inflation, and so the price appears to rise and rise. But each period of increase is always abruptly brought to a halt by a crash, followed normally by a period of price stability for a few years when the price appears to oscillate around a fixed point, before it again begins to climb upward. Today that oscillatory point in the global price of gold is around $1,250 an ounce. The price of gold is interesting because gold is seen as a safe haven, a little like property.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

That is because the gold standard restricts the supply of money and hence the inflation rate. But from the Great Depression through World War ii, the world shifted to a paper money standard. Under a paper money standard there is no legal constraint on the issuance of money, so inflation is subject to political as well as economic forces. Price stability depends on the desire of central banks to limit the growth of the supply of money in order to counteract deficit spending and other inflationary forces that result from government spending and regulation.9 The chronic inflation that the United States and other developed economies have experienced since World War ii does not mean that the gold standard was superior to the current paper money standard.

The United States temporarily suspended the gold standard during the Civil War, but it returned to the standard after the war ended.6 The adherence to the gold standard is the reason why the world experienced no overall inflation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But overall price stability was not achieved without cost. Since the money in circulation had to equal the quantity of gold held by the government, the central bank essentially relinquished control over monetary conditions. This meant that the central bank was unable to provide additional money during economic or financial crises.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

The observed reduction of inequalities, far from being automatic, was largely an accidental consequence of the two world wars (which destroyed many of the factories and much of the industrial equipment owned by the rentier class), the Great Depression (which unleashed a wave of bankruptcies that substantially reduced, and sometimes wiped out, the capital of the richest), and of inflation (which ate away at the value of inherited and accumulated wealth, reaching record heights between 1915 and 1950 after a century of almost uninterrupted price stability).27 The decline, and then the stagnation, of inequality was also a consequence of the exceptional political circumstances of the postwar period, a historic moment of consensus regarding the need for social cohesion and solidarity after the terrible agonies that had torn apart European society.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

In the wake of the crash of the housing bubble, banks were being bailed out all over much of the Western world – everywhere, that is, but Canada. 34 Britannia Unchained None of the major Canadian banks failed. Canada didn’t suffer a housing bubble or dangerous build-up of personal debt. In the years running up to the financial crisis, it ran a minor trade surplus. Indeed, it is hard to think of a more glowing report than the IMF gave in 2009: ‘Through 2007, Canada experienced strong growth, price stability, fiscal and current account surpluses, historically low unemployment, and financial stability.’ The reason for this success? The IMF credited ‘strong fiscal discipline, sound and credible monetary policy, and robust financial supervision and regulation’. Even Canada’s stimulus package was praised for being ‘appropriately sized … prudently based … [and] with sizeable infrastructure spending and permanent tax cuts … weighted toward items that are most effective in stimulating demand’.86 So why did Canada prove so resilient to the worldwide downturn?


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

Congress was never enthusiastic about a dramatically more powerful housing strategy, and Tim and most of those in the Obama administration also believed that additional dollars spent on unemployment benefits, infrastructure projects, payroll tax cuts, and aid to states would have more economic bang for the buck—while raising fewer dilemmas about fairness—than a new wave of programs aimed narrowly at home owners. Solving the economic crisis was a necessary condition for solving the housing crisis, while the reverse was not necessarily true. In the end, a long and steady economic recovery might be the most successful housing program. Home prices stabilized after the Great Recession ended, gradually eliminating trillions of dollars of negative equity, lifting millions of underwater home owners above water. The better economy made almost everything better. U.S. annual auto sales had plunged to 10 million in 2009, but they were back up to pre-crisis levels of 17 million by 2015.


pages: 365 words: 56,751

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

Yet in monetizing a waste resource, the overall marketable energy supply is increased without an increase in its production cost. And demand for the otherwise marketable energy supply in mining is decreased. This implies a reduced market energy price. A corresponding expansion of production generally may result from a reduced market energy price. This price stability [338] is a general characteristic of all products. As such a consequent reduction in overall energy consumption from byproduct mining cannot be assumed , invalidating the theory. However, an overall increase in wealth is implied by greater production at the same cost or same production at lower cost.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Since government will usually be able to influence the prices of luxuries more than of necessities, with a given money supply controls will always tend to raise the prices of necessities dominant in the budgets of the poor. This effect was evident under both the Nixon and Carter efforts for price stabilization. In general the most important effect of the government attempt to shield itself and its clients from uncertainty and risk is to place the entire system in peril. It becomes at once too rigid and too soft to react resourcefully to the new shocks and sudden challenges that are inevitable in a dangerous world.

Parkinson’s Corollary partial equilibrium fallacy Patterson, Orlando Paul, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Saint Paulson, John Peace of Utrecht Peirce, Charles pensions perfect competition perks Perry, George Peterson, Pete Peugeot Citroen Phelps-Brown, Sir Henry photography Piore, Michael Planet of the Apes (film) planning sector Podhoretz, Norman Poland Polanyi, Michael Poles political philosophy politicians politics egalitarianism in as insurance leadership in marketplace of of persecution Polyconomics Population Bomb populism Portuguese Posner, Richard post-industrial age Post Office Department postwar baby boom generation potlatching poverty and the poor belief in wealth as cause of capitalism as cause of male misconceptions of Third World welfare programs and See also War on Poverty; Welfare Pratt, Larry prejudice, racial and ethnic. See also Discrimination price-level theory price pyramid price stabilization primary sector jobs Prince Charles printing, innovations in private enterprise. See Capitalism; Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship producing power purchasing power and productivity decline in in government growth in insurance small business x-efficiency in product-liability suits professional schools Progress and Poverty (Henry George) progressive taxation promotion barriers property taxes Proposition 13, 49, 200-20 1 Protection, business demands for Protestants, white.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

The government cannot confiscate any of my produced raisins for the benefit of their program.”101 But the Department of Agriculture fined Horne more than $1,000 per day for each violation of its orders, and when Horne and his wife were found guilty, they were penalized $275,000 for selling their raisin crop as they chose. There is virtually no empirical or theoretical justification for the “price stabilization” rationale behind agricultural adjustment laws.102 In fact, research shows that such schemes have “conveyed few longterm benefits to the industry” and “reduced . . . long-run grower returns” on investment.103 Consumers pay the price, but even the alleged beneficiaries—family farms—do not really benefit much.

Mahon, 258–59 Pepsi company, job security rules, 233–34 permanent and aggregate interests of the community, 91, 93 Perry, Arthur Latham, 118 Petition of Right, 21 Planned Commercial Zones, 161–62 Populist Era corporations and monopolies during, 39–44 economic freedom argument, 123 Munn and, 102 Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, 57, 58 post–Civil War America. see Populist Era Postrel, Virginia, 206 Pound, Roscoe, xiv–xv, 12, 104, 107–8, 118–19 Powell, Thomas Reed, 11 Powers, Kim, 152 Powers v. Harris, 152–55, 159, 162, 188, 289 predatory pricing schemes, 179–82 price stabilization schemes. see agricultural adjustment programs privacy rights, 282 private agreements monopoly-like, 22–23 see also contracts; specific types of agreements privileges, corporate, 28, 29, 31, 33–35 Privileges and Immunities: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution (David S. Bogen), 288 privileges and immunities clause, 4 Corfield and, 40–41 dormancy, 43–44 overruling, revival, reversal of, 287–92 right to make and enforce contracts, 288–89 Slaughterhouse and, 41–44 states’ rights and, 40–41 productive work, 3 professions barriers to entry, 63, 141 licensing, 23, 63, 99–100, 145–56 restricted entry, 22, 23 restricting or eliminating competition, 289–90 unskillfulness, 23 Progressive Era, xiv–xv, 44–50 eminent domain and, 32 misconceptions about, 47–49 regulation of business and economy, 13, 15, 123–27, 136–37 Supreme Court, 15, 279. see also specific justices 371 Index Progressivism agenda, ideology, and philosophy, 11, 12–13, 44–50, 279–81 assault on economic liberty, 11–16, 44–50, 279–81, 290, 292 changing American political philosophy, 44–50 criticism of and attack on Lochner, 107–10, 121 doctrines, 279–81 economic freedom argument, 123–27 free speech and, 191–92 majority over individuality, 11, 44–45, 109–10, 121, 279, 292. see also collective decisionmaking notion of individual freedom, 116–17 pro-government presumption, xiii–xiv, 11–13, 44–50 rational basis test and, 125–27 rights as permissions, 95, 109, 116–17, 279, 282–83 socialist nature of, 46, 123–27 visionary zeal to do gooders, 13, 46 Prohibition, legacy of, 183–84 property corporate, 34 regulation as secondary to, 272–73 property redistribution government redistributive programs, 283 Progressivism and, 13 property rights, xvii, 24–25 of criminals, 259 givings theory and, 272–74 land-use regulation, 160. see also zoning laws, protectionism and Locke on, 273 ownership as separate from right to use, 257 partial property rights in other people, 290–91 Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, 277–78 right of use of property or land, 257, 271 see also regulatory takings Property Rights from Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment (Bernard Siegan), 283 Prosser, William, 76 protection of the public. see public interest or public welfare protection of unenumerated rights, 93–94 372 protectionism, xvi, 141–44, 173–74 agricultural adjustment programs, 164–70, 174 barriers to entry, 141 contracts clause and, 154 dormant commerce clause and, 153–54 franchise acts and, 170–73, 174 as legitimate state interest, 289 licensing laws, 145–59, 174 necessity of new business and certificates of necessity, 143–44 public choice theory and, 289–90 tariffs, 141 taxi industry example, xi–xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 143–44, 286 zoning laws, 159–63, 174 public choice theory, 289–90 public contracts, 69–73 public interest or public welfare contracts clause, 75–81 Liebmann and, 142–43 Munn and Nebbia and, 101, 125–27. see also rational basis test Powers and, 152–55, 159, 162, 289 seizure of property. see eminent domain doctrine; regulatory takings public nuisance, xvii Blackmun on, 240 common or public right definition, 241 reasonable and lawful conduct, 243–45 reasonableness and unreasonableness, 240–41, 242 regulatory takings and, 258 tort law abuse, 239–45 public policy, manipulation of contracts and, 214, 215, 220–24 public use, synonymous with public benefit, 255 Pumpelly v.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Focusing exclusively on keeping inflation (too) low has come at the expense of financial stability and living standards, while privileging creditors over debtors. At the very least, then, the ECB needs a broader mandate that takes account of both asset-price and consumer-price inflation, financial and price stability, as well as growth and employment. It also needs to be more accountable to democratic authorities – the European Parliament as well as a committee of national parliamentarians. There also needs to be more cooperation between elected fiscal authorities and unelected monetary ones. Closer coordination would ensure better economic outcomes, while the ECB ought to take account of the views of elected governments.

, Vox.eu, 20 December 2011 http://www.voxeu.org/article/global-savings-glut-or-global-banking-glut 41 High-Level Expert Group on Reforming the Structure of the EU Banking Sector, chaired by Erkki Liikanen, 2 October 2012 http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/bank/docs/highlevel_expert_group/report_en.pdf Table A1.2: total number and assets of monetary financial institutions by country (March 2012) 42 OECD, Debt of financial corporations, as a percentage of GDP, DBTS12GDP 43 OECD, Household debt as a share of gross disposable income, DBTS14_S15GDI In the UK it rose from 112.39 per cent in 2000 to 174.15 per cent in 2007, that is by a factor of 1.55; in the Netherlands it rose from 163.72 per cent in 2000 to 242.37 per cent, that is by a factor of 1.48. 44 See Nationwide House Price Index, http://www.nationwide.co.uk/hpi/historical.htm and http://www.cotizalia.com/cache/2008/07/03/46_europa_preocupa_mucho_ajuste_inmobiliario_espana.html 45 Philippe Legrain, Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis, Little, Brown: 2010 46 Nouriel Roubini with Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, Allen Lane: 2010 47 Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, Wiley: 1978 48 Philippe Legrain, Open World: the Truth about Globalisation, Abacus: 2002 49 Financial markets were deemed efficient in the sense that prices set by the market were “right” since they were determined by rational investors acting on all available information and mistakes were rapidly corrected by other profit-seeking investors. 50 As Bill White has observed, in the 1980s the fight against high inflation was justified on the grounds that it was ‘necessary’ for macroeconomic stability. Then, somehow, it morphed into the belief that price stability was ‘sufficient’ for such stability. 51 For example, gross capital flows both within the eurozone and into and out of it nearly tripled between 2002 and 2007. Source: Philip Lane, "Capital Flows in the Euro Area", European Economy, Economic Papers 497, April 2013. Capital flows in and out of Britain also soared. 52 See Hélène Rey’s excellent “Dilemma not Trilemma: The Global Financial Cycle and Monetary Policy Independence”, paper presented at Jackson Hole, August 2013. http://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2013/2103Rey.pdf 53 For example, in the Mais Lecture at Cass Business School on 11 May 2006, Trichet said: "It is sometimes argued that the convergence in euro area government bond spreads which was seen in the run-up to Monetary Union is evidence that the process of financial integration may be detrimental to the functioning of market discipline, the latter being the influence exerted by markets on governments by pricing different risks of default.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

These wrongheaded policies, he said, just caused more investors to flee the greenback and switch their investment portfolios to commodities or foreign markets, where there were greater possibilities to receive higher returns, and which further increased Bob’s input prices. He did not see commodity prices stabilizing in the near future until the greenback regained its strength and the debt situation in the eurozone stabilized. Breaking it down further, Bob showed how an appreciating renminbi cut into his company’s profits. If salaries, rents, and commodity prices went up at a conservative 10 percent a year, and the renminbi appreciated 5 percent annually, that meant his overall costs would rise 15 percent a year.


pages: 274 words: 60,596

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School by Andrew Hallam

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, diversified portfolio, financial independence, George Gilder, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mary Meeker, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, random walk, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

During a slowdown for building-material suppliers, Fastenal’s shares in late 2010 should have been priced a lot lower than they were five years ago when the U.S. housing market was in its full-bubbled boom. But Fastenal’s shares haven’t struggled nearly as much as the company’s counterparts. Figure 9.1 reveals that (as of January 2011) they were priced higher than they were five years previous at the height of the building boom. Figure 9.1 Fastenal’s Debt-Free Balance Sheet Gives Price Stability During Recession Source: Yahoo! Finance12 Some investors like to look at businesses’ debt-to-equity ratio. In others words, how much debt does a company have relative to assets? That’s fair enough. But I’ve always preferred choosing businesses (preferably) with no debt at all. It’s especially wise to give ourselves a margin of safety when it comes to company debt.


pages: 230 words: 62,294

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

When the time arrives, that price is locked in, regardless of what is happening in the market. In this way, large buyers can use the futures market to “hedge” their purchases. Hedging means taking a futures position opposite to their actual purchasing, so, no matter what happens in the market, they will both win and lose, and thereby obtain price stability. Because the coffee supply can be so drastically altered by weather, the ability to absorb future risk in this way is an important component of a smoothly running market. In July, during the Brazilian winter, coffee traders worldwide monitor the weather there much more closely than the weather in their own backyards.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

The budget accordingly provided for a sharp rise in value-added tax, which now rose to 15 percent. This point also gave Thatcher cause for nervousness. As she was perfectly aware, the hike in VAT would add several percentage points to retail prices, thus contributing to inflationary pressures. This was not the only factor that looked likely to undermine price stability. In its final months the Callaghan government had agreed on substantial pay hikes for public-sector unions, and during her campaign Thatcher had agreed to respect her predecessor’s pledges. Just as expected, inflation rose. The consumer price index jumped from 11 percent in the summer to 20 percent by the end of 1979.

It was Milton Friedman who had declared—with bracing but controversial clarity—that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” In the view of Friedman and other monetarists, the notion that governments could tame inflation by demand-side methods, like tinkering with wage and price controls, was utterly illusory. The acolytes of monetarism insisted instead that government’s task was to ensure price stability by restraining the supply of money in circulation—or, to use the more populist formulation, to slow down the rate at which government printing presses were turning out banknotes. Thatcher’s team was not breaking entirely new ground here. Key members of the Callaghan government’s economic team—above all his own chancellor, Denis Healey—had already accepted the basic monetarist premise.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

Rather we look to a fiat standard like the US dollar and we convert the value of the Bitcoin to actually price goods and services. The argument people tend to use is that, well, it’s still a small economy, if it got really large people would price things with it. ‘The other problem is that I don’t think there’s ever going to be price stability with Bitcoin. ‘First, there are a lot of innovative pressures. There’s tons of competition, there’s over 300 altcoins and there’s always new technology being invented. So that does have a very significant effect on the price of Bitcoin. ‘Second, we have rapid demand changes. Suddenly there are loads of buyers, everyone wants to get into Bitcoin, then just as suddenly they don’t.


pages: 206 words: 70,924

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

While we see that four scholars worked independently to develop the link between the mean return and the variance of a security and its market price, we will forever associate this new methodology of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) with the great mind William Sharpe. 4 A Roadmap to Resolve the Big Questions 5 However, while Sharpe’s insights helped us better understand how an individual security is priced, the greatest need for the rapid pricing of securities was in the derivatives market. This new financial market, once the sleepy domain of farmers and food processors concerned about price stability for the future delivery of agricultural commodities, now represents an annual market value that rivals the combined size of the world’s economies. There is now a much greater volume of trading in these derivatives, in commodities futures and in options markets, in credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities, in foreign exchange futures and bond futures than in the traditional market for corporate securities.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

Price and demand Second, while the price fluctuates with the demand, it actually decreases over time until it stabilizes at a price between $5 and $5.50. Notice this corresponds with the cost of creating goods, which we set at $5 at the beginning of the simulation. The logic in the Producer class’s produce method prevents the price from ever dropping below the cost. This is the reason why the price stabilizes at around $5. But why does the price drop at all? This is due to the market economy again. Remember that the consumer always buys the cheapest goods first. This means the producer with the higher prices will have unsold goods, which in turn forces the prices to go down. The end results are that the average price goes down until it nears the cost of producing the goods.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But the Germans hate, hate, hate the idea of inflation, thanks to memories of the great inflation of the early 1920s. (Curiously, there is much less memory of the deflationary policies of the early 1930s, which are what actually set the stage for the rise of you-know-who. More in chapter 11.) And perhaps more directly relevant, the ECB’s mandate calls on it to maintain price stability—period. It’s an open question how binding that mandate really is, and I suspect that the ECB could find a way to rationalize moderate inflation despite what the charter says. But the mind-set is certainly one in which inflation is considered a great evil, no matter what the consequences of a low-inflation policy may be.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Key initiatives included a massive $787 billion stimulus bill that Obama signed into law within a month of becoming president, a bailout package for the auto industry, a bit of tax relief for members of the working class, and reduction of the prime interest rate to essentially zero percent. Overall, this package of initiatives worked—sort of. Housing prices stabilized, unemployment eased, and stock indices began to recover. Yet this success was hardly without drawbacks. Among them: several years in which the federal deficit exceeded a trillion dollars. During the Bush administration, the national debt had more than doubled to over $11 trillion. During the Obama-engineered recovery, it broke through the $20 trillion barrier.30 Justified as necessary to restore economic health, these mushrooming deficits suggested that federal authorities had once and for all abandoned even the pretense of minimal fiscal discipline.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

A partial answer, however, was for Americans to make do with less. So he would “oppose any further reductions in federal income taxes.” He implored “all employers in this country to limit total wage increase to a maximum of 7 percent per year.” He announced the formation of a new Council on Wage and Price Stability, or COWPS, to establish voluntary price guidelines for businesses to follow. He insisted that “whether our efforts are successful will finally depend on you as much as me.” He concluded, “Reducing the deficit will require difficult and unpleasant decisions. We must face a time of national austerity.

It felt like the bill was coming due for a generation of economic boom times that had secretly been built on a foundation of death. * * * ALFRED KAHN, THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY economics professor the president appointed as his new anti-inflation “czar,” announced to a conference of retailers that unless business adhered to his forthcoming Council on Wage and Price Stability guidelines, “we will have a deep, deep depression.” The stock market, which had just enjoyed its first gains after a month of plunging values, suffered a near panic. One Oregon newspaper illustrated a feature about the speech with 1930s-era photographs of an emaciated farmer puffing out the empty pockets of his overalls, an unemployment line, and a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp.

A dozen black leaders told the president they might be “unable to contain the urban unrest that would follow that decision.” Alfred Kahn admitted to another group of black leaders that reducing budget deficits was an “inefficient” way to fight inflation—but “until you show me there is a better way, I have no choice.” He implored them to help promote compliance with his Council on Wage and Price Stability guidelines, pleading, “We cannot hope to devote the additional resources you and I would like to rebuilding our cities, to resuming our progress to four percent unemployment, and to provide decent medical care to everybody in this country until we somehow restore the balance between what we want and what we can afford,” he said.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Like Elvis, who claimed in his line of work that knowledge of music was not strictly necessary, Greenspan did not need to know much about economics.16 In oracular pronouncements, Greenspan excelled at “lacquering a slate of ignorance with a thin coating of knowledge.”17 At a July 1996 meeting, discussing the target rate of inflation, Governor Janet Yellen argued for 2 percent. Greenspan waffled about price stability. Asked to define the term, Greenspan said that it was “the state in which expected changes in price level do not effectively alter business or household decisions.” Pressed further, Greenspan expressed preference for zero inflation, correctly measured. The consensus was for 2 percent incorrectly measured.

Ben Bernanke “The economic outlook” (5 May 2005), Testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress. 6. “Savings versus liquidity” (11 August 2005) The Economist. 7. Robin Harding “Bernanke says foreign investors fuelled crisis” (18 February 2011) Financial Times. 8. Fisher, Irving “The debt-deflation theory of great depressions” (1933) Econometrica: 337–57. 9. William White “Is price stability enough?” (April 2006) Bank of International Settlements. 10. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times coined the phrase; see Gillian Tett “Should Atlas still shrug?” (15 January 2007) Financial Times. 11. The phrase “new liquidity factory” was coined by Mohamed El-Erian. 12. Total outstanding volumes of derivative contracts are greater, around $600 trillion (see Chapter 14).


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Thousand-euro suits: Mary did not fail to let her Irish disdain for such peacockery show. She could convey that disdain with a look while still being ostensibly polite, but of course it didn’t help in terms of getting her what she wanted. She saw very clearly that the European Central Bank was entirely focused on price stability and increasing its power in the world to carry out that task. If they were asked to adjust the interest rate half a point to save the world, they wouldn’t do it. Outside their purview. The People’s Bank of China on the other hand was a state-owned operation that held the most assets of any central bank on Earth, approaching four trillion US dollars; and although they were independent compared to most Chinese divisions of government, they were still ruled by the State Council.

Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers. MMT also reiterated Keynes’s point that governments did not experience debt like individuals did, because governments made money in the first place, and could create new money without automatically causing inflation; the quantitative easing (QE) after the 2008 crash demonstrated this price stability despite major infusions of new money. So MMT recommended robust stimulus spending in the form of carbon quantitative easing (CQE) as well as a job guarantee. Both were to be directed to the effort to decarbonize civilization and to get in a sustainable balance with the biosphere, humanity’s one and only support system.


pages: 279 words: 72,659

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, desegregation, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Islamic Golden Age, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, one-state solution, price stability, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail

The pro-oil lobby in America lost its impact when, in 1973, the Arab oil-producing states declared their famous embargo. But when it transpired that this step was not, as declared, meant to assist the Palestinians but rather to bring up oil prices, the embargo became a fleeting episode. After all, such aggressive tactics in the world of business are the bread and butter of the capitalist system. And when prices stabilized, to the satisfaction of all concerned, the oil-producing Arab states began formulating a definite pro-American policy. The lesson was clear: American administrations found they could ensure oil flow from Saudi Arabia and, at the same time, categorically reject any sensible peace proposals made by the Saudi crown for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Myrdal distinguished between ex ante calculations of rates of return, which were made under uncertainty, and ex post, when one could be sure of what had happened. Entrepreneurs invest on the basis of an expected or ex ante rate of return; what they realize is the actual or ex post rate of return. The gap between the two drives the economy. Myrdal made the radical suggestion that Wicksell’s notion of price stability as the sine qua non of a monetary equilibrium was inapplicable to a dynamic economy. In such an economy, inventions constantly improved productivity and raised the natural rate of interest. This meant that the task of the banking system was constantly to adjust the market rate to keep up with it.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

They settled on an initial money supply of ten million shares and allowed bidders to squirrel away their currency to make a single big purchase, which was of particular value to the smaller food banks. One unexpected consequence of becoming a market designer was that Prendergast found himself playing the role of central banker. Central bankers manage money supply, and they do so in large part to keep prices steady. Price stability was also a major concern of small food banks: since they made relatively infrequent purchases, historical prices provided them with guidance on how much to bid. For the Federal Reserve (the United States’s central bank), this involves too many complications to enumerate here—from figuring out how many one hundred dollar bills in circulation are hiding under Russian mobsters’ floorboards to estimating the rate at which bills flow through the economy to assessing investors’ beliefs about future money supply (which may make them spend, or stuff more bills in mattresses), and so on and so forth.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

The answer lies in the basic truth that the dollar, whether fixed to gold or floating, is always and everywhere a “ruler”—a measure of value. Bartley, Brookes, and Reagan made basically the same point: that the price of oil in dollars tends to revert to one-tenth, one-twelfth, or one-fifteenth of an ounce of gold. This is important because, as Forbes noted in 2006, during the last period of dollar-price stability, whereby the greenback was defined as 1/35th of an ounce of gold, the price of oil hardly fluctuated. With gold stable in dollars, so was the price of oil stable in dollars. Indeed, monetary economist Nathan Lewis has pointed out that from 1982 to 2000, “the dollar’s value was crudely stable vs. gold around $350/ oz.”17 What is interesting about the period he describes, one in which the global economy boomed, is that there were no notable advances in oil-extraction techniques.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Another might be intellectual property rights applied to certain technologies used for mining, perhaps in the process of converting ice to fuel, creating scarcity there instead. Finally, and perhaps most sensibly, one could foresee the adoption of predatory pricing for commodities mined off-world, with the price of each fixed marginally below the cost of operating the cheapest terrestrial mines. This would serve to keep drills turned off on Earth while maintaining price stability and guaranteeing huge profits for mining companies. It isn’t hard to imagine how this might be justified by big business and the political establishment, with off-world mining companies presenting themselves as custodians of the future. ‘We have learned our lesson as a species,’ they might say, internalising seemingly progressive arguments from the green movement.


pages: 264 words: 74,313

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

The ensuing economic crisis was partly met by borrowing: by 1993 debt had accumulated to $15 billion. Even with this massive borrowing, average incomes duly collapsed by around a third. Poverty soared. The politics compounded these economic problems. The tax on cocoa had been disguised as a price stabilization scheme: the price was guaranteed, but at a level that had been below the world price. As world cocoa prices fell to levels nobody had anticipated, the price guarantee duly kicked in: the cocoa-producing immigrants were being subsidized instead of taxed! To keep the political deal in place the civil service continued to expand, exacerbating the collapse of the private economy.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

By the early 1970s, only twelve states still had fair-trade laws on the books.6 In 1975, President Gerald Ford finally ended the forty-year experiment in manufacturer-controlled pricing with the Consumer Goods Pricing Act, “enabling,” as he wrote in his signing statement, which sounds oddly like an advertisement, “consumers in all 50 States to shop for the best products at the lowest possible prices.”7 There was not a clean end to the fair-trade laws, but there was a clear rise in free-market pricing in the 1950s and 1960s that allowed discounters to take advantage of lower manufacturing costs. Without price stability, manufacturers had to look for other ways to cut costs—such as manufacturing overseas—to maintain profitability. Even with such movements, manufacturing profits took a hit, which in turn made other forms of investment, such as finance, more appealing. The discount store grew so fast not only because of its prices but because of the way it changed how Americans shopped.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Despite the huge changes in economic conditions and technology over the past three decades, and occasional financial and economic crises, there has been a tendency for similar patterns to repeat themselves in financial markets, and for cycles to emerge, albeit in slightly different forms. In a 2019 paper, authors Filardo, Lombardi and Raczo noted that, over the past 120 years, the US has gone through the Gold Standard period, when inflation was low, and the 1970s, when inflation was high and volatile, and that over this long historical period the price stability credentials of central banks has shifted and fiscal and regulatory policies have varied considerably, but that ‘through all of this, the financial cycle dynamics have remained a constant feature of the economy’.4 It is these cycles, and the factors that drive them, that this book explores. Its purpose is to show that, despite significant changes in circumstances and environments, there still appear to be repeated patterns of performance and behaviour in economies and financial markets over time.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

“The Fed expands its balance sheet by creating more currency, by printing money ex nihilo, literally out of nothing. The Fed takes this new money created out of thin air and goes to the open market to buy stuff. This is the mechanism by which the Fed expands its balance sheet.” We turn the page. “In theory, the Fed has three key goals. The first is price stability. This is a fancy way of saying it needs to keep an eye on inflation. Inflation is like the oatmeal for Goldilocks: you don’t want it too hot or too cold. Inflation around 2% is just right. After the disastrous experience of Germany in the 1930s, and in the USA in the ’70s, this became the top priority.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Schultze might have advised outright wage and price controls, but the failure of Nixon’s ill-conceived program made that politically impossible. Instead, the Carter advisers proposed a voluntary system of wage and price restraints for business and labor starting in April 1977. Barry Bosworth was put in charge of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, the commission that had been formed earlier under Nixon, which would administer the new voluntary restraints. By the time the program went into effect in the spring, Carter backtracked on his stimulus proposal. The economy, he thought, seemed to be reviving, as retail sales strengthened in April and inflation rose slightly for a couple of months.

., 1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5, 19.1, 19.2 Connally, John, 3.1, 3.2 Conrad, Kent Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), prl.1 conservatism, itr.1, prl.1, prl.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1, 11.1 consumer prices, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 6.1, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 11.2 Consumer Product Safety Commission, prl.1, 3.1, 11.1 consumer protection, itr.1, prl.1, 2.1, 3.1, 11.1, 14.1, 19.1, 19.2 consumer spending, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 14.1, 19.1 Continental Illinois, 6.1, 11.1 Control Data Cornwall Capital, 15.1, 19.1 Corrigan, Gerald Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 7.1, 9.1, 14.1 Council on Wage and Price Stability Countrywide Financial Services, 14.1, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3 Courtright, Hernando Cox, Christopher Cox Communications, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 credit cards, 1.1, 11.1, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 17.1, 18.1, 18.2 credit default swaps (CDSs), 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4 credit markets, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 6.1, 11.1, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1, 15.2, 17.1, 18.1, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4, 19.5, 19.6 credit ratings, 6.1, 6.2, 12.1, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4, 19.5 Credit Suisse First Boston, 17.1, 17.2 crisis of 2008, x, 6.1, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3 crop failures, 3.1, 3.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 Curie, Marie, 2.1, 19.1 currencies, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 11.1, 14.1, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 15.7, 15.8, 15.9, 17.1; see also dollar, U.S.


pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

From time to time somebody would ask about it and one or another insider—members of the original underwriting syndicate—would say that the company’s earnings were better than expected and the prospects more than encouraging. This was true enough and very good as far as it went, but not exactly thrilling. The speculative appeal was absent, and from the investor’s point of view the price stability and dividend permanency of the stock were not yet demonstrated. It was a stock that never behaved sensationally. It was so gentlemanly that no corroborative rise ever followed the insiders’ eminently truthful reports. On the other hand, neither did the price decline. 21.2 In most of Reminiscences, Lefevre depicts Livermore in his role as a trader.

That would have made them short to the extent of 25 per cent of the total amount offered for subscription to the public, and that, of course, would have enabled them to support the stock when necessary and at no cost to themselves. Without any effort on their part they would have been in the strong strategic position that I always try to find myself in when I am manipulating a stock. They could have kept the price from sagging, thereby inspiring confidence in the new stock’s price stability and in the underwriting syndicate back of it. They should have remembered that their work was not over when they sold the stock offered to the public. That was only a part of what they had to market. They thought they had been very successful, but it was not long before the consequences of their two capital blunders became apparent.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

I used to think that this was true but I don’t any more. The ‘Internet of things’ and always-on connectivity have eroded the cost differential between the two. He went on to say that there would not be a universal currency for a long time. There is a big advantage to separate currencies providing price stability in different parts of the world. I don’t think there will be a universal currency ever. It doesn’t make sense in economic terms, let alone in technological or social or political or business terms. He further said that corporations would not issue their own private currency. I’m not so sure about this.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The combination of changing prices and large amounts of money seeking a safe home led to demands to deregulate the financial system that stimulated a general push for deregulation and affected policy decisions in the following decades.5 The Fed did not know how to contain the price shocks of the 1970s, and “stagflation”—both inflation and unemployment—was the result. President Carter tried to end this monetary chaos by appointing Alfred Kahn to head the Council on Wage and Price Stability and promote deregulation and then, under pressure, Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve System and rein in inflation. Kahn, banned from using the term “recession,” famously said, “Let’s call our condition a banana.” Volcker dramatically raised interest rates sharply and slowed the growth of money.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

And now we learn from Bob Woodward’s new book, excerpted recently in the Washington Post, that Fed chair Alan Greenspan persuaded Bill Clinton to drop the modest public investment agenda he campaigned on in favor of hair-shirt deficit-cutting. Who is this Fed, and can anything be done about it? To financiers’ eyes, the economy has just got too strong for comfort. Though current inflation rates are about as low as any we’ve seen in the past thirty years, there’s profound worry among bankers and Fedsters that this relative price stability is about to end. Such price hawks are convinced that the U.S. economy cannot grow at a rate faster than 2.5 to 3.0 percent a year—quite slow by historical standards—without lapsing into a sickly inflation. If unemployment gets too low, meaning much below current levels, then workers might develop an attitude problem, and the twenty-year decline in real hourly wages might be reversed, however briefly.


pages: 219 words: 15,438

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Your joy at our conclusion that lower rates benefit a number of our operating businesses and investees should be severely tempered, however, by another of our convictions: scheduled 1988 tax rates, both individual and corporate, seem totally unrealistic to us. These rates will very likely bestow a fiscal problem on Washington that will prove incompatible with price stability. We believe, there- 202 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 19:1 fore, that ultimately-within, say, five years-either higher tax rates or higher inflation rates are almost certain to materialize. And it would not surprise us to see both. • Corporate capital gains tax rates have been increased from 28% to 34%, effective in 1987.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

He also suggests informal cooperation between poorer countries dependent on commodities to earn foreign exchange to increase their market power: For example, in May 2005 a new government in Ecuador (which exports more bananas than any other country) signed a decree to regulate the volume of bananas leaving the country. Two months later, Malaysia and Indonesia announced a bilateral plan to cooperate on the palm oil, rubber, cocoa, timber and other markets in order to ensure price stability and eliminate the undercutting of their position by others … On the world tea market, discussions have been reported involving all four leading tea producers, China, India, Kenya and Sri Lanka.19 This may be considered ‘unfair trade’ as it represents effective cartels in the markets for different commodities but it is a response to the unfairness of the negotiations in those very markets, which have for centuries been dominated by the rich Western nations to the detriment of the South.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

That might be true, but given that the banks had run down their capital to a negligible sliver, the assumption was both heroic and irrelevant. A growing discussion is taking place, too, about the case for leaning against the wind – that is, raising interest rates more than would be necessary to maintain price stability in the short and medium term in order to curb a dangerous increase in banks’ risk appetite or to dampen overheating asset prices. As for waving sticks and spitting into the wind, the points show a realistic appreciation of the difficulty of influencing markets. This is a salutary warning for central bankers in the aftermath of the crisis, since they are now committed to macro-prudential policymaking, which entails imposing counter-cyclical increases and decreases in banks’ capital buffers, as well as other forms of intervention such as quantitative controls on lending.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Care should be taken in interpreting the estimates as they are the latest available but not necessarily from the same year. 3 See “Top 10 Tax Dodgers,” Time, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1891335_1891333_1891317,00.html. 4 Branko Milanović, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now: An Overview,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6259, November 2012. http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6259. 5 “Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video,” Mother Jones, 19 September 2012. www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video. 6 Ben S. Bernanke, “What the Fed Did and Why: Supporting the Recovery and Sustaining Price Stability,” Washington Post, 4 November 2010. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/03/AR2010110307372.html. 7 The term “human shields” was suggested by Steve Randy Waldman, “Some Thoughts on QE,” 2 November 2014. www.interfluidity.com/v2/5773.html. 8 See United Kingdom's Budget 2012: Thirtieth Report of Session 2010–12, vol. 1, p. 26; oral evidence to the Treasury select committee, Bank of England February 2012 Inflation Report, HC (2010–12) 1867, Q 84. 9 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891. www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm. 10 George Orwell, “Marrakech,” in Essays, Everyman's Library (1939) 2002, pp. 121–22. 11 Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism, Crown Business, 2000, p. 14. 12 George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in Essays, Everyman's Library (1942) 2002, p. 400. 13 The term “economic apartheid” was first suggested by Simon Kuper, “Economic Apartheid, Just Less Black and White,” Financial Times, 25 April 2014. 14 David Cameron, “The Big Society,” Sixth Annual Hugo Young Memorial Lecture, London, 10 November 2009. www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2009/nov/10/david-cameron-hugo-young-lecture. 15 Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in Arthur Quiller-Couch (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, Oxford University Press (1751) 1919. www.bartleby.com/101/453.html. 16 Robert Shrimsley, “The Nine Stages of the Piketty Bubble,” Financial Times, 30 April 2014. 17 Pope Francis, “Evangelii Gaudium,” 24 November 2013. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html. 18 See Benedict Mander and John Paul Rathbone, “Chile: Limits to Growth,” Financial Times, 1 July 2014. 9.


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

For example, capitalism managed to relate to the southern US slave economy quite effectively in the first half of the nineteenth century. In contrast, the great depression wreaked havoc with the American system of family farms, and it was only very significant state intervention carried out by President Roosevelt in the 1930s that re-established a degree of price stability at levels which enabled some farming families to survive. After World War II, with the enormous upswing of the mechanization and chemicalization of agriculture, and with enormous state support, the American food system became increasingly capitalist at every step of food provision from field to table.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

The first mobile phones bought and sold in the developing world were capable of little more than voice calls and text messages, yet even these simple devices could make a significant difference. Between 1997 and 2001 the economist Robert Jensen studied a set of coastal villages in Kerala, India, where fishing was the main industry.10 Jensen gathered data both before and after mobile phone service was introduced, and the changes he documented are remarkable. Fish prices stabilized immediately after phones were introduced, and even though these prices dropped on average, fishermen’s profits actually increased because they were able to eliminate the waste that occurred when they took their fish to markets that already had enough supply for the day. The overall economic well-being of both buyers and sellers improved, and Jensen was able to tie these gains directly to the phones themselves.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the short term, the Federal Reserve can be important in controlling liquidity risk. Healthy banks can borrow cash from the Federal Reserve, using their sound assets (typically government bonds) as collateral. This cash inflow can be used to meet depositors’ demands. In the long term, however, the existence of the Fed magnifies risk. The Fed has the dual goals of price stability and low unemployment. As previously described, the Fed often overexpands the money supply to eliminate natural market corrections, and this effectively provides a major incentive for banks to take more risk. The Fed reduces short-term liquidity risk at the expense of increasing credit risk. There is an interesting contrast between the early years of the Great Depression and the recent financial crisis.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Redstone, who had overpaid for Blockbuster and was still taking a lashing for it in the financial press, was thrilled, but he still wanted to pull Viacom’s money out of the chain before the cable companies’ new gambit—video on demand—started to erode its market share. The plan was to spin off 20 percent of Viacom’s Blockbuster stake in 1999 to make a market in the stock, and to sell off the rest when the share price stabilized. Viacom sent Antioco and Blockbuster’s new chief financial officer, Larry Zine, who had served as Antioco’s number two at Circle K, on a road show to present the plan to investors. Zine was a slight and quiet man, and he became fast friends with Antioco when the two men worked to bring Circle K out of bankruptcy.


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, later a member of the Nixon administration and an advisor to Ronald Reagan, occasionally added their views on economic issues, including a defense of the gold standard by Greenspan that, in combination with his lifelong admiration for Rand, came back to haunt him when he was named chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Ronald Reagan. (Nixon had divorced the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, completing a separation begun by FDR.) He never lost his respect for gold. “I have always harbored a nostalgia for the gold standard’s inherent price stability,” he wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence. Other scholarly young Rand devotees, including Peikoff, Hessen, Reisman, and Barbara Branden, contributed essays on problems in philosophy and history, book reviews, and commentary on current events. There were few or no outside contributors.

composing essays was child’s play: Harry Binswanger, “Recollections of Ayn Rand.” clarity and logic: MYWAR, p. 297. warns against defining national emergencies too broadly: Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” TON, February 1963; reprinted in TVOS, p. 49. “for the gold standard’s inherent price stability”: The Age of Turbulence, p. 481. she endorsed Goldwater: TON, October 1963 and March, July, September, and October 1964. helped to found the club and magazine: Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004. famous Goldwater rally: This took place on May 12, 1964. “It made his points in his voice”: Unpublished taped interview with Barbara Weiss, conducted by BB, September 25, 1983.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

There was permanent tension between Paris and Berlin over the exchange-rate value of the French franc and Deutschmark, all well told in David Marsh’s books on European central banking and the problems of the euro. In the 1980s inflation was still strong – running at about 10 per cent in France (13.6 per cent in 1980). Today there is price stability in France at around 1.5 per cent, though some economists believe that to be too low. Low interest rates mean France saves between €30 and €60 billion a year in debt payment. Between 1986 and 1992 the difference in borrowing costs – the spread, in technical jargon – between Germany and Italy was 5.1 per cent.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

In a speech in 2014, Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and perhaps America’s most pedigreed economist, summed up the problem this way: “I think it is fair to say that six years ago, macroeconomics was primarily about the use of monetary policy to reduce the already small amplitude of fluctuations about a given trend, while maintaining price stability.” In other words, the main preoccupation of figures like Bernanke and Summers and Yellen was trying to keep lemonade prices within a manageable bound. But by 2014, that had changed. “Today, we wish for the problem of minimizing fluctuations around a satisfactory trend,” Summers said. His real concern, he vouchsafed in that speech, was that the system had undergone what is known as hysteresis: a term for a moment when something breaks and can never be put back together again.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

In 2009, Christopher DeMuth, head of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank in Washington, identified the restraint of domestic spending as one of four key elements of Reaganism: the others were tax cuts, “stable money” (low inflation), and deregulation.7 Indeed, Reagan’s deregulation of price in the oil and gas industry on his first day in office was just the start. On the same day he imposed a hiring freeze on all federal agencies. The following day he abolished the Council on Wage and Price Stability.8 The deregulatory impulse was also controversially extended to environmental legislation and to the financial sector.9 The new president also quickly took on the unions. In the summer of 1981, about seven months into his first term, Reagan clashed with air-traffic controllers in a dispute that hugely disrupted air travel across the country.


pages: 339 words: 100,075

Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

Columbine, hiring and firing, messenger bag, price stability, profit maximization, VTOL

That he would send money and food back to his blighted land that now existed only in his mind, in his dreams, and in half-awake hallucinations of deserts, red and black saris, of women in dust, and their black hands and silver bangles, and their hunger, so many of the last memories of hunger. He had fantasized that he would smuggle Gita back across the shining sea, and bring her close to the accountants who calculated calorie burn quotas for the world. Close to the calories, as she had said, once so long ago. Close to the men who balanced price stability against margins of error and protectively managed energy markets against a flood of food. Close to those small gods with more power than Kali to destroy the world. But she was dead by now, whether through starvation or disease, and he was sure of it. And wasn't that why Shriram had come to him?


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The price of a slave in South Carolina rose from about $110.37 in 1720 to about $307.54 in 1800. But that increase barely matched the rate of inflation. In real terms, slave prices remained flat. But, as economists point out, the price of slaves should represent the stream of profits that farmers expected from their labor. Price stability thus suggests that this expected stream did not grow very much. Substitute illegal immigrants for slaves, and similar patterns emerge in the United States today. For decades American farmers have relied on cheap immigrant labor to tend their crops. In 1986, they pressed to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly 3 million illegal immigrants.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Good intentions, bad outcomes The subsidy economy operates under a set of distorted rules that bear little relation to the rough-and-tumble world of the open market. In an open market, the scarcity of a particular commodity is signalled by a price rise and the market usually responds accordingly. Faced with an increase in onion prices, a housewife might simply choose to buy fewer onions or none at all until the prices stabilize. If fertilizers are expensive, farmers will use them sparingly. In the closed, artificial system created by subsidies, these market forces are no longer in effect, with harsh consequences. Let’s look at fertilizers first. Subsidies keep prices low, and farmers use them lavishly; according to World Bank data, India’s usage of fertilizers outstrips that of the US.10 This is a massive environmental problem, because fertilizer overuse—that of urea in particular—has the paradoxical effect of reducing soil quality and decreasing crop yields.


pages: 340 words: 100,151

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We started this section by talking about liquidity being one of the reasons to go public, but so far we’ve said nothing about liquidity. For investors, liquidity is still a ways off, since they are generally required to execute a lockup agreement that restricts their ability to sell stock for the first six months post-IPO. The reason for this is price stabilization as well; we worry that if the VCs (or founders and executives who own a lot of stock) dump all their stock immediately, it could have a big impact on the trading price. Even once the lockup expires, VCs may still be restricted depending on whether they remain on the board of directors (and might be subject to the company’s trading policy, which restricts the time intervals during which officers and directors can trade) or on how much stock they own (there are sometimes volume limitations associated with large holders).


pages: 364 words: 101,193

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, Climatic Research Unit, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Garrett Hardin, hindcast, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Medieval Warm Period, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, price stability, South China Sea, supervolcano, Tragedy of the Commons

As aid agencies frequently complain, the issue is poverty, not just drought. But if one thing is certain, it is that famines are more likely in a world with less food to go round overall. With increasing competition over diminishing harvests, prices will soar on world markets during lean years. Food price stability in the two-degree world will depend on northern land areas being opened up to new crops rapidly enough to replace yield losses in hotter, drier areas to the south. With assiduous planning and adaptation, the world need not tip into serious food deficit. However, if the temperature rises past two degrees, preventing mass starvation will be increasingly difficult, as future chapters will show.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The main difference, of course, is that the proceeds of money printing by agents of the government go to the government and the proceeds of money creation by banks go to the banks (Fisher 1936/2009). Economists acted as key allies of the bankers. They let the ideas of Fisher and Simons fade into oblivion and spent all their effort devising strategies to keep central banks from printing “too much” money while almost completely ignoring the dangers of money creation by banks for price stability and financial stability. The less money central banks create, the more leeway there is for private banks to create money. With the public finances of many industrial countries ruined by the need to bail out banks and the economy, governments are overdue in reclaiming the power to control the amount of money in circulation and to reduce net taxation using the profits from creating that money.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

While prices continued to fall, inventory came down, from 4.04 million in July 2007 to 2.38 million in December 2011. That constituted a 6.2-month supply at the prevailing sales rate.1 These levels aren’t healthy by a long shot, but they’re much closer to healthy and represent a vast improvement. Price stability and appreciation don’t just stop the pain; they add to wealth and improve banks’ balance sheets. Keep in mind that this improvement has come in the absence of any serious change in government policy. There will come a day when housing isn’t a drag. In fact, that day may be here. In the third and fourth quarters of 2011 residential investment contributed 0.03 and 0.25 percentage points to the rate of economic growth, respectively.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

In 1848, inflation correlated closely with revolt: the higher the cost of bread, the more revolutionary the outcome. In 2011, Tunisia, Yemen and Lebanon experienced price hikes which, in 1848, would have been prompted expectations of violent revolution; Egypt, Jordan and Palestine, meanwhile, were off the scale. Saudi Arabia stood exactly where England had stood as Europe raged 150 years ago: with food price stability and minimal unrest.21 Commodity price inflation, as all global agencies agree, hammers the poor. It turns the ‘acceptable’ poverty of $2 a day into utter destitution. And the problem is that it has become endemic. Every economic recovery now sparks a commodity boom, mainly because of structural factors which currency manipulation by rich countries only exacerbates: population growth, rising demand in India and China, resource scarcity and the impact of climate change.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

In a full-employment economy with a healthy industrial sector, workers whose wages are rising can afford to pay high prices for services and pay rising taxes. But with the offshoring of the high-productivity sectors, the source of rising wages shrinks. Add the ideological resistance to tax increases and the undercutting of the bargaining position of labor, and you have a formula for wage stagnation. Add in economic policies that favor price stability over full employment and you have a formula for wage decline. Still, Pollyanna will not be suppressed. Like Alan Blinder, the few pundits who have looked toward the personal service future tell us to cheer up. “The people of the future will be richer than the people of today,” writes Matthew Yglesias.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

However, bonds had a negative rate of return in real terms during the succeeding decades of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, while stocks had positive rates of return during that era. In other words, money invested in bonds during those inflationary decades would not buy as much when these bonds were cashed in as when the bonds were bought, even though larger sums of money were received in the end. With the restoration of price stability in the last two decades of the twentieth century, both stocks and bonds had positive rates of real returns.{483} But, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, all that changed, as the New York Times reported: If you invested $100,000 on Jan. 1, 2000, in the Vanguard index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, you would have ended up with $89,072 by mid-December of 2009.

The sharpest rate of increase in the price of gold in one year was 135 percent in 1979—and the sharpest fall in the price of gold was 32 percent just two years later.{575} Existing or expected inflation usually leads to rising prices of gold, as people seek to shelter their wealth from the government’s silent confiscations by inflation. But long periods of prosperity with price stability are likely to see the price of gold fall, as people move their wealth out of gold and into other financial assets that earn interest or dividends and can therefore increase their wealth. When the economic crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s passed, and were followed by a long period of steady growth and low inflation, the price of gold fell over the years from about $800 an ounce to about $250 an ounce by 1999.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As theorists now realize, expanding money and bank credit without limit during an upswing and permitting them to contract without limit during a downswing, far from encouraging stable growth, would amplify fluctuations in income and output. In particular, unlimited money creation during a boom would fuel any inflationary fires and other excesses that developed. Today, the Fed sees its major policy job as pursuing a countercyclical monetary policy. Specifically, it attempts to promote full employment and price stability by limiting the growth of bank intermediation when the economy expands too vigorously and by encouraging it when the economy slips into recession. To achieve these objectives, a stable predictive relationship between inflation and economic growth, often referred to as a Phillips curve, is necessary, according to many models.2 Controlling the Level of Bank Intermediation The Fed has the ability to control the level of bank intermediation—the amount of bank lending and money creating—through several tools, although its main tool is its open market operations.

IMPLEMENTING MONETARY POLICY The primary policy tool available to the Fed is open market operations, the ability to create bank reserves in any desired quantity by monetizing some portion of the national debt.1 The Fed could in theory monetize anything—scrap metal to soybeans—but it has stuck largely to Treasury IOUs because there has never been any shortage of them; also, they are highly liquid so the Fed can sell them with as much ease as it buys them. In formulating policy, the first question the Fed faces is what macroeconomic targets to pursue. There are various possibilities: full employment, price stability, or a “correct” exchange value for the dollar. The achievement of all 1 See Chapter 2 for an explanation of debt monetization and a primer on how the Fed creates and destroys bank reserves. these targets is desirable. However, since the Fed has only one powerful string to its bow—the ability to control bank reserves and thereby money creation by the private banking system—and given the fact that the Fed now targets interest rates rather than reserve levels, the Fed must conduct its open market operations in a way that strikes the right balance first and foremost via the appropriate target rate.

In hindsight, it is striking to think that despite all these factors, inflation fears were strong enough to push the yield on the 30-year bond to over 8%. It hasn’t even come close to that in recent years, averaging about 4.95% over the five years ending in September 2006. When the Fed began its fight against inflation, it was fighting fears that were not its own. As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once said, price stability exists only when “the expected rate of change of the general level of prices ceases to be a factor in individual and business decision-making.” Other Fed officials have expressed similar thoughts. Thus, even though the 1994 inflation threat did not appear to be as great as investors feared, it nonetheless was affecting the way individuals and investors behaved.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Today economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, using invalid equilibrium models (the economy is not an equilibrium system), propose more deficit spending by deeply indebted countries for indefinite periods to stimulate demand, as if someone with four televisions buying a fifth is the way forward. This is folly. Monetarists are no better. Milton Friedman’s insight was that maximum real growth with price stability is achieved by slow, steady growth in the money supply. Friedman wanted money supply to rise to meet potential growth—a variation of the Irish toast, “May the road rise to meet your feet.” Friedman’s adopted formulation, MV = PQ (originally from Fisher and his predecessors), says that money (M) times velocity (V) equals nominal GDP (consisting of real GDP [Q], adjusted for changes in the price level [P]).


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Kurz fails to emphasize that volatility—large upward or downward moves—requires general agreement among investors about the future, so that sellers have difficulty finding buyers willing to take their offers near the most recent price and buyers have difficulty finding sellers willing to make offers near the most recent price. Stability in prices necessitates disagreements in outlook between buyers and sellers. Volatility in the underlying fundamentals, such as earnings, dividends, and interest rates, is “exogenous volatility,” or volatility occurring outside the marketplace. Endogenous volatility is what Shiller is talking about when he refers to excess volatility.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

And in the opaque language that he had perfected, he came as close as a central banker can to saying he thought stocks were overvalued: But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? … We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability…. But we should not underestimate or become complacent about the complexity of the interactions of asset markets and the economy. Thus, evaluating shifts in balance sheets generally, and in asset prices particularly, must be an integral part of the development of monetary policy.17 In his autobiography, Greenspan admits wondering whether the market would understand what he was getting at.18 It did—and ignored him!


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

Professor Viscusi is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on cost-benefit analysis, and his estimates of the value of risks to life and health are currently used throughout the federal government. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice. He was deputy director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability in the Carter administration. He also served on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for seven years and is currently on the EPA Homeland Security Committee. Professor Viscusi is the founding editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, now housed at Vanderbilt.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

A tax avoids the messy and contentious process of allocating allowances to countries internationally and among companies domestically. For example, nations could negotiate a much more transparent treaty than the Kyoto Protocol and establish a system of globally harmonized domestic carbon taxes. Harmonized taxes offer relative price stability, and taxes on carbon emissions can be raised gradually and predictably over time so that governments, industries, and consumers can all see what the price of carbon-based fuels will be over future decades and can make investment and purchase decisions accordingly. Nordhaus further argues that carbon markets are “much more susceptible to corruption” than are tax schemes.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But they did become responsible for safeguarding the internal value of the currency, via inflation targets. The first formal adoption of an inflation target was by New Zealand, and other central banks followed suit. (In the US, the Federal Reserve targets no particular inflation rate but has a mandate to ensure price stability.) POLICY IN A WORLD OF FLOATING RATES The era of floating exchange rates, ushered in by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, brought a whole new challenge for the global economy. In one sense, it was a relief. Governments did not have to devote time and resources to defending a particular currency level.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

The underlying theory, set out in Greenspan’s famous 1996 “irrational exuberance” speech, was that the Fed should not attempt to head off bubbles, but instead should focus on helping the economy recover when those bubbles popped: “[H]ow do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? … We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability.”36 This position was an endorsement of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the idea that the Fed should not attempt to determine if prices are accurate, but should leave that function to the markets. Wall Street appreciated Greenspan’s monetary policy, because it meant that he would not raise interest rates preemptively to choke off a boom (unless that boom was also creating higher inflation).


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Yet the industry had been counting on those projects to maintain a steady stream of liquid fuels a few years out, so worries about a future supply crunch began to make headlines.31 It is the financial returns on their activities that motivate oil companies to make the major investments necessary to find and produce oil. There is a long time lag between investment and return, and so price stability is a necessary condition for further investment. Here was a conundrum: low prices killed future supply, while high prices killed immediate demand. Only if oil’s price stayed reliably within a narrow — and narrowing — “Goldilocks” band could serious problems be avoided. Prices had to stay not too high, not too low — just right — in order to avert economic mayhem.32 The gravity of the situation was patently clear.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

“Ambiguity has its uses, but mostly in noncooperative games like poker,” Bernanke told his colleagues in 2003. “Monetary policy is a cooperative game. The whole point is to get financial markets to do some of our work for us.”3 Bernanke expanded his practice of “information as monetary tool” by becoming more specific about the Fed’s intentions for achieving its goal of price stability. Before becoming chair, Bernanke had urged the Fed to consider setting an explicit target, but he didn’t get far with Greenspan. He made that his goal after becoming chair, and arrived there in several steps over the course of five years. By 2009, once the fed-funds rate had been lowered below even 2003 levels, Bernanke believed even more strongly that setting an official target would be desirable to assure the public that the Fed was committed to making sure inflation wouldn’t be too high or too low—again, to avoid the paralyzing problem of deflation.


pages: 470 words: 107,074

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

And the expensive contracts stemming from the 1978 law were still on the books. So the utilities lobbied hard to continue recouping those costs, arguing that they needed the money to survive. * * * In truth, Steve Peace wasn’t totally comfortable with the idea of deregulation when it came time to implement it. He recognized the risk in trading price stability for price volatility in the provision of a critical service. But he had been assigned the task because he had the mind for it. He was committed to achieving the objective in a way that protected residential customers from major price swings and created a transparent market for trading power. He held the first hearing on July 11, 1996, and then another in early August.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

However, I caution you against overdoing it in this regard; it is easy to fall into deep analytical traps using technical analysis that are not at all guaranteed to enhance your portfolio management skills on any level. My best advice is to start slowly, understanding the areas of historical price stability for the securities you are trading, and to have some sort of game plan when pricing patterns violate these equilibrium levels. Measures of volatility, correlation, VaR, technical analysis, and scenario analysis can all be useful in helping you determine and manage the specific levels of exposure in your account.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman calls the constraints imposed by these players “the Golden Straitjacket”: To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Furthermore, owing to profit maximization efforts of private actors, purely private monetary systems were also susceptible to hyperinflationary episodes much like state-issued money. The conclusion was that a purely private monetary system would not provide the socially optimum quantity of money. Second, when the authors modified their model to simulate the coexistence of both private and government fiat , the price stability of both private and government monies could only be attained if the government maintained a constant supply of its money. In the real world, a government would need to indulge in expansionary and contradictory policies in order to react to market and political changes. As a result, the government would be obliged to deviate from this practice of maintaining a constant supply, which makes the coexistence of private and government monies an unstable means of exchange.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

No individual bank was responsible for the monetary excesses of that period or can be blamed for the subsequent collapses in asset prices. It would be wrong for bankers and their regulators to set capital ratios to anticipate such violent asset price movements. To summarize, US commercial banks appear to have significantly more capital now than at the end of 2008. Assuming that American house prices stabilize or continue rising, the US banking system is far from being bust. If regulators attempt to impose further large increases in capital requirements, the banking industry and its customers would be right to resist. Contrary to the impression given by the media, a good case can be made that the crisis in the United States—the country that is supposed to have been the main culprit for the disaster—has been institution specific rather than general and systemic.


pages: 403 words: 119,206

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

Greenspan’s new interpretation was unveiled in 1999; he said then that the market represented the sum total of the “judgments of millions of investors, many of whom are highly knowledgeable about the prospects for the specific companies that make up our broad stock market indexes.”22 He concluded that the Federal Reserve should let investors set stock values; it is not the function of the central bank to do it for them. According to The Wall Street Journal, Greenspan was one of the first economists to suspect that private sector productivity was surging, taking note of rapidly increasing investment in capital equipment and rising profit margins at a time of relative price stability. He has therefore become much more receptive to the “new paradigm” idea that rapidly accelerating earnings growth may justify higher P/E ratios. Similarly, Greenspan is now apparently more receptive to the argument that stocks are not actually as risky as they have appeared to be (or actually were) in the past.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

In 2011 the Bahamas Electricity Corporation signed an agreement with Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation to construct two OTEC plants. “In general, in the markets we are in, the cost of OTEC energy is comparable to fossil fuel,” said Ted in a follow-up interview with colleague Jess Philips. “But OTEC can beat fossil fuels on guaranteed price stability. With OTEC the cost of fuel is free because the ‘fuel’ in this case is ocean water. So the price doesn’t increase or decrease over time . . . The price of fossil fuel is continuously increasing and decreasing so it is difficult to compare the costs. You have all these wild gyrations, which create instability.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

When recession hit the US at the start of the 1980s, the immediate impulse was, on balance, for collectivism in social policy. That is not how we remember things, partly because after the inflationary 1970s came a period of conservative ascendency in macroeconomics – high interest rates and consequent unemployment came to be regarded as an acceptable levy to pay for price stability, a big break from the post-war years. We remember the early 1980s as a right-wing time, too, because a deeply conservative president, Ronald Reagan, went on to secure re-election in the economic upswing. But a question that was repeatedly asked in the General Social Survey (GSS) – recorded in the graph opposite – shows that the proportion of Americans who supported redistributing (by taxing the wealthy and assisting the poor) rose from 43% in 1980 to 49% in 1984.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Regardless of what the Lemon board wanted to do, Wences said, “I would advise you to invest as much money as you can stomach losing.” He told O’Brien to buy coins at Mt. Gox, but to move the coins off Mt. Gox as soon as the order went through. “It is either going to be worth zero or worth five thousand times what it is today.” IN THE DAYS that followed, Mt. Gox reopened for business and the price stabilized around $100. But many believed that the recent price crash proved the flaws in the whole concept. Felix Salmon, a financial columnist at Reuters, wrote a widely circulated article pointing out that the volatile price of Bitcoin made it nearly impossible to use for its most basic purpose, as currency.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

You’d want to cover your manipulation in plenty of complicated talk about statistics, but the talk wouldn’t signify a string bean. The second thing you’d want to do is to start churning out new dollar bills. You’d print like crazy. You wouldn’t talk about trashing the currency, of course; you’d talk about price stability, about quantitative easing, about Operation Twist and bringing down the long end of the yield curve. Ideally, too, you’d have someone in charge who really believed in the value of what he was doing, someone who didn’t really live in the real world. Maybe a professor of something. A guy who had studied a period of history from eighty years ago and who’s been yearning all his life to save the world using techniques which might or might not have worked back then, but which certainly don’t make sense in the present day.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Ideally, we should have been able to get all the relevant parties in a room and say, look, this inflation has to stop; you workers, reduce your wage demands, you businesses, cancel your price increases, and for our part, we agree to stop printing money so the whole thing is over. That way, you’d get price stability without the recession. And in some small, cohesive countries that is more or less what happened. (Check out the Israeli stabilization of 1985.) But America wasn’t like that, and the decision was made to do it the hard, brutal way. This was not a policy triumph! It was, in a way, a confession of despair.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Yet EY was bound by client confidentiality and legally unable to resign. Thomas Eichelmann, so media-savvy when it suited him, remained silent. The board eventually acted in May, by taking away Braun’s megaphone; it gave the responsibility for company communications to Alexander von Knoop. Wirecard’s share price stabilized at around €90 as investors, analysts and regulators all waited for the verdict of Ernst & Young. Some of those threw their hands up; the analyst at one French broker, Kepler Cheuvreux, had been honest enough in print to say that his initial favourable reaction to the special audit was published without reading the German report.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Next, a group of participants—the more the better—are invited into the market and encouraged to start trading the securities with each other. Those who think that inflation will be greater than 3% will be willing to pay more for the security than those who think it will be less than that. If the price stabilizes at $0.70, a reasonable interpretation is that the market as a whole believes that there’s a 70% chance that inflation will average more than 3% for the quarter (or that the movie will make between $50 million and $100 million, or that so-and-so will become president in 2020). Finally, when the event actually occurs—in this case, when the quarter ends and average inflation can be calculated—the market maker pays out to all of the people holding the right securities.


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Available: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Saudia_Arabia/Oil.html. 50 GUSHER OF LIES countries, including Venezuela, have agitated for higher prices, the Saudis have generally sought to stabilize global oil prices at levels that are good for both consumers and producers. This fact was made clear by Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi in 2006 during a speech in Washington, when he said: Energy security cannot be maintained when prices are at extremes— too low or too high. Truly sustainable energy security for consumers and producers requires three conditions—price stability, supply and demand reliability, and affordability. These are the three pillars of sustainable energy security. Affordability applies to both consumers and producers. If producers are forced to sell their energy resources at a low price, they eventually cannot afford to make the capital investments required to maximize long-term capacity.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Robert Mundell, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics, has argued that bungled monetary policy in the 1920s and 1930s caused chronic deflation that destabilized the world. He has argued, “Had the price of gold been raised in the late 1920s, or, alternatively, had the major central banks pursued policies of price stability instead of adhering to the gold standard, there would have been no Great Depression, no Nazi revolution, and no World War II.”1 The job would not appear to be that complicated. If the Fed can make the economy grow faster by lowering interest rates, then presumably lower interest rates are always better.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Recent data suggest an upward trend in pensioners filing for personal bankruptcy in the United States, which has been attributed to the costs of health care. See Tara Siegel Bernard, “Too Little, Too Late: Bankruptcy Booms among Older Americans,” New York Times, August 5, 2018, available online at www .nytimes.com (last accessed August 8, 2018). 72. Some central banks, the Fed among them, operate under the dual mandate of price stability and full employment. See Sec. 2.a. of the Federal Reserve Act, available online at https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section2a.htm. 73. For a useful overview of the scope of regulatory reforms in the United States, see Viral V. Acharya et al., Regulating Wall Street: The Dodd-Frank Act and the New Architecture of Global Finance (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011).


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 39, no. 1 (1998): 59–84; and Alexander Ebner, “The Intellectual Foundations of the Social Market Economy: Theory, Policy, and Implications for European Integration,” Journal of Economic Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 206–223. 42. Alessi, “Germany’s Central Bank.” However, as Wade Jacoby points out, while the Bundesbank was set up with the primary goal of focusing on price stability, the treaty that set up the European Central Bank also envisioned that it would pursue many other goals, including “social peace” (personal communication). 43. The technical reason for this is rather more complicated, and includes the market’s anticipation of likely future inflation. See R. J.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

As a further result of the program, prices were higher in the United States than they would have been without the protection. Moreover, the quotas put the prorationing systems in Texas and the other states back into a position where they could stabilize domestic prices. Indeed, domestically, the ten-year period following the introduction of the mandatory quotas was reminiscent of the price stability that followed the full implementation of prorationing in the 1930s. The average price of oil at the wellhead in the United States in 1959 was $2.90 a barrel; a decade later, in 1968, it was $2.94—stable, certainly, and also 60 to 70 percent above Middle Eastern crude in East Coast markets. In contrast, by closing off the American market, the mandatory controls resulted in lower prices outside the United States.

The picture of the future world that thus emerged was a projection of the then-current circumstances: Growing economies would continue to call upon growing volumes of oil. Economic progress in developing countries would add to the demand. The future effects of conservation were discounted. The stage would be set for a repetition of 1973. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the leading proponent of a Long-Term Strategy for OPEC, began to depart from his customary advocacy of price stability and instead argued for regular, small increases in the price that would encourage conservation and development of alternative sources. This, he said, was much preferable to and less destabilizing than the wrenching increase in price that had become the common expectation. "From our own studies and from all the reliable studies I have read," he said in June of 1978, "there are very strong indications that there will be a shortage of supply of oil sometime around the mid-1980s if not before. ...

But, he added, "I happen to believe, and always have, that a strong domestic U.S. industry is in the national security interests, vital interests of this country." Bush was clearly saying that market forces had gone too far. And he was quickly and embarrassingly disavowed by the Reagan White House, whose spokesman declared, "The way to address price stability is to let the free market work." The White House pointedly said that Bush would stress to King Fahd that market forces, not politicians, should determine price levels. Bush's first stop was in Riyadh, where he dedicated the new United States embassy building. At a dinner with several ministers, including Yamani, the talk, of course, dealt in part with oil, and Bush commented that, if prices remained too low, pressure would build in the United States Congress for a tariff, and it would become increasingly difficult to resist that pressure.


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

After that, I could walk around town telling people that I had just been talking to the President today and, while it would mean nothing substantively, it would have meaning in Washington. That’s just the way this city works.” As the Carter administration was nearing its end, Rubin got a payoff of sorts in the form of a job offer at the White House to head up the Council on Wage and Price Stability, which was part of the effort to bring inflation under control. Rubin explored the opportunity. “Few notions were more appealing to me than seeing the world from inside the White House,” he wrote. He went down to Washington, met with the relevant people, but decided against taking the job. “I was left with the impression that that job wasn’t positioned to work, in terms of either staffing and authority within the administration or its conceptual approach,” he continued.

Gerald Corzine, Joanne Dougherty, 14.1, 14.2 Corzine, Jon, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 14.1, 15.1, 17.1, 18.1 background of double role of early mistakes at Goldman Sachs of as Friedman’s successor, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 goals and aspirations of health problems of loyalty to LTCM deal and, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5 Maxwell lawsuit and mergers desired by, 16.1, 16.2 and move to go public, 14.1, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 17.1 1994 losses and, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 16.1 “palace coup” against, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2 Paulson’s relationship with, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6, 16.7, 16.8, 17.1 positive thinking of, 15.1, 15.2 Coster, F. Donald cough syrup Coulson, Frank Council of Foreign Relations Council on Wage and Price Stability Countrywide, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 22.1 Coyne, Herbert, 9.1, 9.2 Coyne, Marty Cramer, James, prl.1, 10.1, 17.1, 24.1, 24.2 C. R. Anthony, 7.1, 7.2 credit-card receivables, 18.1, 18.2 credit-default swaps (CDSs), 18.1, 18.2, 19.1, 19.2, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, 21.1, 21.2, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3 Credit Suisse Group, 12.1, 20.1 credit support agreement Credit Support Annex CS-1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6, 11.7 Cuckney, John Cullman family Cunningham, Bill Cunningham, Jeffrey Cunningham, Mary Curran, Paul, 11.1, 11.2 currencies, 16.1, 16.2 see also specific currencies Daily Mirror, 14.1 Daily Word, 5.1 Dauphinot, Clarence Davies, Gavyn Davies, Joseph Davilman, Andrew, 21.1, 23.1 Davis, Charles “Chuck” Davis Polk & Wardell Day, H.


pages: 525 words: 146,126

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Greenspan’s first several months at the helm were rough ones, for Greenspan and for the financial world at large. In his last speech to Congress on July 21, 1987, outgoing Fed chief Volcker suggested that no more than modest credit tightening was required. But right from the get-go, Greenspan determined to have 1950s-style price stability. Aides to Reagan were afraid Greenspan would out-Volcker Volcker. Even though he compared the 1980s to the 1920s, Greenspan “began in earnest to tighten the money supply, which caused the market crash in October,” says neo-Objectivist financial advisor Jim O’Donnell of the USA Financial Group.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Real per capita GNP is three-fourths what it was in 1980, and foreign debt absorbs 30 percent of export earnings. As a reward for this economic miracle, the IMF, Interamerican Development Bank, and the G-7 Paris Club offered Bolivia extensive financial assistance, including secret payments to government ministers. The miracle that is so admired is that prices stabilized and exports are booming. About two-thirds of export earnings are now derived from coca production and trade, Burke estimates. The drug money explains the stabilization of currency and price levels, he concludes. About 80 percent of the $3 billion in annual drug profits is spent and banked abroad, mainly in the US, providing a lift to the US economy as well.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In an ideal world, Ben Bernanke would give a speech acknowledging the Fed’s failures and blunders in which he was complicit, and pledge to return the Fed to its traditional role, which a former Fed chairman, William McChesney Martin, famously defined as “taking away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.” This is unlikely to happen, and change may have to be imposed on the Fed policymakers. At the moment, their so-called dual mandate is to ensure “maximum sustainable employment and price stability.” Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach has suggested that Congress alter the Fed’s mandate to include the preservation of financial stability. The addition of a third mandate would mesh with the Fed’s new regulatory role as the primary monitor of systemic risk, and it also would force the central bank’s governors and staff to think more critically about the financial system and its role in the broader economy.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Thanks to the way the federal government promoted home ownership, suburbanites learned to become more racist as a means of financial survival. It wasn’t enough just to turn races against one another for the sake of a housing market tilted toward real-estate speculators. The very design of the neighborhood had to incorporate this bias toward segregation and isolation for the sake of price stability. These practices were fully institutionalized by 1934, when the Federal Housing Administration was set up, ostensibly to jump-start the construction industry and put people back to work. The sole strategy of the FHA, however, was to insure long-term mortgages: a bank would still make the loan, but the FHA would back it up if the borrower defaulted—much as the Fed is now insuring the “liquidity” of failing predatory mortgage lenders.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Thus, we start to see the shape of a traditional hub-and-spoke conspiracy, where each retailer provides the hub with data and pricing authority, knowing that its rivals are doing the same. The vendor’s pricing algorithm does, in fact, use the market information it collects from each retailer in determining the optimal prices for each retailer’s products. Prices stabilize as a result, and the retailers’ and algorithm vendor’s profits increase. Each competitor might have independent business justifications for electronically 50 The Collusion Scenarios sending its data to a third-party pricing vendor. But the competitors also recognize that doing so collectively will likely increase prices and their profits.


pages: 444 words: 128,701

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business by Christopher Leonard

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, commoditize, estate planning, facts on the ground, invisible hand, longitudinal study, mortgage debt, payday loans, price discovery process, price stability, Ralph Nader, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The idea was to keep prices high enough to throw the middle class a lifeline and iron out the volatility of the market. Critics of the plan said it would lead to a dangerous level of government control over the economy, but they were answered with a simple response: The laws were temporary. They were emergency actions that would be repealed once farm prices stabilized. In Arkansas, the new edicts all but wiped out the cotton farmers who scratched a living from the Ozark soil, creating a willing crop of farmers to build chicken coops and buy chicks on contract from John Tyson. It wasn’t the first gift that John Tyson would get from government intervention.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

The state reports 5,000 New Yorkers are illegally drawing unemployment insurance—$400,000 a week—while basking in Florida’s sunshine. Ten percent of all National Student Loans to New York State residents—$55 million—have not been repaid. In March 1978, coal miners received a three-year 39 percent wage and benefit hike. The Teamsters Union reflexively demanded the same. According to the White House Council on Wage and Price Stability, since 1950 doctors’ fees multiplied 80 percent faster than inflation, and in 1977 zoomed 9.3 percent, or 50 percent more than consumer prices. The pay of Edgar Griffiths, head of RCA, jumped 26 percent in 1977, to $475,000. Chairman David Rockefeller, according to a 1976 Chase prospectus, was compensated $279,168 annually (exclusive of his dividend payments) and was eligible for a $125,904 annual pension upon retirement.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Steel bargaining therefore spilled over from economic conflict and into politics.21 The federal government involved itself with steel industry bargaining and pricing throughout the postwar period. Agreements between labor and management in steel were worked out in the Oval Office. Famously, the Truman administration attempted to nationalize the industry in 1952 to maintain wartime wage and price stability. In 1956, despite an avowed hostility to politicized collective bargaining, President Eisenhower helped broker an end to an industry-wide strike and was angered by the subsequent inevitable price increase. He issued repeated warnings in public, including in his State of the Union address, about steel prices.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Except for parts of central and eastern Europe, emerging markets lacked the leverage in the financial and household sectors that became the Achilles’ heel of many advanced economies. Moreover, having endured financial crises in recent decades, these countries cleaned up their financial systems, followed sound fiscal policies, and insulated central banks from political pressure so that they might better provide price stability. These strengths and lessons learned enabled the emerging economies to weather the crisis well. They implemented effective monetary and fiscal policies to restore demand and growth, setting themselves up for a quick recovery. In fact, most of them will grow at a healthy clip, should they stick with the market-oriented reforms and policies adopted before the crisis.


pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

But the specialists’ performance from the final hours of Black Monday and through the trading day on Tuesday was far more uneven. According to the Brady Report, “a substantial number” of specialists had not met their obligation to be “a significant force in counterbalancing market trends.” The report did concede that “[t]he limited nature of the specialists’ contribution to price stability may have been due to the exhaustion of their purchasing power following attempts to stabilize markets” on the morning of Black Monday. “our markets performed flawlessly during the crash”: Melamed, Escape to the Futures, p. 373. Melamed actually called the phrase “the Merc’s party line.” “it’s in nobody’s interest to be throwing hand grenades”: James Sterngold, “Exchanges Seek Ways to Heal Split,” New York Times, November 7, 1987, p. 37.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Formal economic and monetary union would be a way to harness the strength of the German currency and economy and to defuse what the French called the ‘atom bomb’[41] of the Deutschmark. Genscher, reflecting the economic liberalism of his FDP, welcomed the EMU idea, whereas reservations were expressed by CDU finance minister Gerhard Stoltenberg and other advocates of price stability, low inflation and the social market economy. Kohl initially inclined to Stoltenberg but then backed Genscher and Delors in setting up the so-called Delors Committee at the Hanover EC Council of June 1988.[42] This committee of ‘wise men’, chaired by the Commission president himself, was charged with sketching out possible paths to monetary union.

It set out three conditions for moving towards economic and monetary union: full and irreversible convertibility of currencies, free movement of capital, and irrevocably fixed exchange rates. They were unanimously accepted at the Madrid EC Council in June 1989. Even the Bundesbank considered this an ‘optimal’ outcome – initially preserving the system of national central banks, firmly committing to price stability and rejecting the idea of introducing a single currency before the three conditions had been achieved.[45] There was, however, one serious caveat. Pöhl emphatically repudiated the idea of a European Central Bank (ECB). He deplored any transfer of monetary sovereignty away from the Bundesbank, historically regarded by most West Germans as the guarantor of the strong Deutschmark and thus of the country’s post-war prosperity.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

They therefore recommended that the central bank continue to hold nearly half of its total gold stock and that "the separated portion of gold is to be sold in small steps."27 Despite this bow to potential popular anxieties, the entire spirit of the report rests in its unquestioning confidence that the forecasting and managerial skills of the directors and staff of the central bank would perform a better job than obeisance to the gold stock in "the priority of maintaining price stability." This view was by no means revolutionary doctrine in 1997-on the contrary, it represented mainstream thinking. Nevertheless, this was the Swiss, not the British or the Americans or some minor-league country. The Swiss were legendary in their attachment to gold and in their aversion to holding currencies of countries whose devotion to the constant struggle to keep inflation in check was less passionate than theirs.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

On the mountainous Gargano peninsula in Italy’s rustic southeast, he was struck by locals’ use of gettoni, or tokens, in pay phones—because the value of lira coins was falling so fast that phone booths couldn’t keep pace. By his late teens, Mr. Weidmann said recently, he had “inhaled” the Bundesbank view: Central banks exist to defend a currency against politicians’ cravings for easy money. Germany’s obsession with price stability is often said to stem from 1920s hyperinflation under the Weimar Republic. But for modern Germany’s economic elite, it is rooted in a more recent experience: the postwar success of West Germany. In Germans’ collective memory, the Bundesbank’s refusal to make politicians’ life easy by printing money was critical.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Not surprisingly, powerful rentier interests lean on governments to prioritise limiting inflation. Of course, since borrowers are also consumers, unless their incomes keep abreast of inflation, they lose out from inflation on the prices of consumer goods. The neoliberal governments of the 1980s and 1990s covertly supported rentiers by publicly supporting consumers’ interests in price stability. But there’s one kind of inflation that rentiers love: asset inflation; this is neoliberalism’s dirty secret. It redistributes wealth from those who lack assets and have to rely on earned income to those who have them and can use them to get unearned income. Value-skimming Rent, interest, profit from production and capital gains from asset inflation are not the only sources of unearned income.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Its first decade of independence was marred by stasis, with successive protest votes resulting in the return of the exiled king as prime minister. Unable to maintain Cold War levels of industrialization without Soviet subsidies, Bulgaria experienced what one analyst called “de-development,” in which the “East became the South.” Only through the EU’s preaccession process did the situation begin to turn around. Wages rose and price stability resulted from pegging the currency to the euro. See Rossen Vassilev, “De-Development Problems in Bulgaria,” East European Quarterly, September 22, 2003. 6. According to two experts on the Balkan wars, the Contact Group formed to settle the festering conflict “was reminiscent of nineteenth-century Great Power politics.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The reverse is also true, which is why the long and deep recession of the early 1980s — much longer and deeper than policymakers had tolerated in the 1970s — "broke the back" of inflation, as the cliche runs. It also broke more than a few workers, but to Wall Street, that was mere collateral damage in a holy war for price stability. Liberals and populists often search for potential allies among industrialists, reasoning that even if financial interests suffer in a boom, firms that trade in real, rather than fictitious, products would thrive when growth is strong. In general, industrialists are less than sympathetic to these arguments.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

By the mid-1920s, 80 percent of all the world’s cars were located in the United States: America boasted a motorcar for every 5.3 people compared with one car for every 44 people in England and France. A car that cost the average worker the equivalent of nearly two years’ wages before the First World War could be purchased for about three months’ earnings by the mid-1920s. Thereafter the price stabilized, but quality continued to improve: you got more car for your buck (and more ways of financing the bucks you needed to buy your car). The automobile industry revolutionized the distribution of wealth. In 1924, Henry and Edsel Ford ranked second and third in a federal government list of top taxpayers (Rockefeller was still number one), and Mrs.


The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money by John Maynard Keynes

bank run, behavioural economics, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, delayed gratification, full employment, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, marginal employment, means of production, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Keynes price-instability due to change cannot affect the actions of entrepreneurs, but merely directs a de facto windfall of wealth into the laps of the lucky ones (mutatis mutandis when the supposed change is in the other direction). This fact has, I think, been overlooked in some contemporary discussions of a practical policy aimed at stabilising prices. It is true that in a society liable to change such a policy cannot be perfectly successful. But it does not follow that every small temporary departure from price stability necessarily sets up a cumulative disequilibrium. III We have shown that when effective demand is deficient there is under-­ employment of labour in the sense that there are men unemployed who would be willing to work at less than the existing real wage. Consequently, as effective demand increases, employment increases, though at a real wage equal to or less than the existing one, until a point comes at which there is no surplus of labour available at the then existing real wage; i.e. no more men (or hours of labour) available unless money-wages rise (from this point onwards) faster than prices.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

August 10, 2013, 11:34 a.m. Tweet (@fake_train). 14 2013 revenue: Google Investor Relations. “2014 Financial Tables.” investor.google.com/financial/tables.html. 14 2012 revenue: Tim Peterson. “Google Finally Crosses $50 Billion Annual Revenue Mark: Company Begins to Reverse CPC Declines, Mobile Pricing Stabilizing.” Adweek. Jan. 22, 2013. adweek.com/news/technology/google-finally-crosses-50-billion-annual-revenue-mark-146710. 14 Google+ signups: Jon Brodkin. “Google Doubles Plus Membership with Brute-Force Signup Process.” ArsTechnica. Jan. 22, 2012. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-membership-with-brute-force-signup-process. 14 Search results: Sean Gallagher.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

After that meeting in December 2011, I asked him why he did not simply do what was standard practice in London and Washington and ‘print money’ by buying government debt on a massive scale? ‘We have a treaty,’ he replied, ‘and the treaty states what our primary mandate is, namely to maintain price stability. Also, the treaty prohibits monetary financing. I am old enough to remember that, when this treaty was written in the early 1990s, some of the countries around that table were actually doing what you suggest doing now, namely some of the central banks of these countries were financing the government expenditure of their governments through money creation, and the consequences were there for all of us to see.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Such credit was non-inflationary, and it also benefitted commerce through the substitution of a less bulky medium of exchange.3 The Gold Standard What in fact is the classical notion of a gold standard, and how well did we adhere to that ideal? The classical gold standard holds considerable appeal because it produced an extraordinary interlude of per capita income growth and price stability in the 19th century. However, the gold standard has been honored more in the breach than the observance historically, even in that hallowed time. Under a classical gold standard countries hold stocks of gold in reserve, and they are ready to see these exported to settle up surpluses of paper foreign currency that gets accumulated through trade imbalances.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

But whatever suspicions some New Dealers harbored about the “old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly”—had given way during the Second World War to a productive collaboration between business and government—productive in two senses of the term: the American economy had embarked upon a period of unparalleled growth, and the regulatory apparatus of the postwar decades tended to embrace the prerogatives of producers above all.98 Most postwar regulation of major industries was accommodating rather than adversarial. The government facilitated price stability and expansion of service while minimizing competition.99 The mixed economy of the postwar decades had its roots in the economic philosophy and institutions of the New Deal. Indeed, the agencies responsible for overseeing the key industries of the 1950s and 1960s were established during the 1930s.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Since the catch varied quite a bit from day to day, there were a lot of wasted fish at some beaches, while at the same time there were often disappointed customers at others. This is a stark example of misallocation. When cell phone connectivity became available, fishermen started to call ahead to decide where to land; they would go where there were lots of customers waiting and not a lot of boats. As a result, waste essentially vanished, prices stabilized, and both customers and sellers were better off.92 This first story spawned a second one. The main tool of trade for a fisherman is his boat, and good boats last much longer than bad boats. The technology of making a fishing boat is always the same, but some craftsmen are much better at it than others.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The ECB was a compromise between the French, who wanted a single currency to tie a reunited Germany into the EU, and the Germans, who worried that the single currency would require them to bail out other profligate governments. To reassure the Germans, the bank’s headquarters were in Frankfurt and its main target was price stability. It was specifically prohibited from bailing out member governments. The first signs that central banks might not have all the answers came in Japan. More than four decades of rapid economic growth came to an abrupt end as the 1980s drew to a close. When the bubble started to pop in 1990, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) was relatively slow to react.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Shiller’s friend Jeremy Siegel happened to find a 1959 Fortune magazine quotation in which Greenspan refers to the “over-exuberance” in the financial community, and it’s most likely that Greenspan came up with the phrase on his own.37 According to Greenspan, “The concept of irrational exuberance came to me in the bathtub one morning as I was writing a speech.”38 Whoever coined the phrase, the “irrational exuberance” speech was, for Greenspan, the perfect opportunity to speak up about the value of assets. Price stability was relevant not only for product prices such as clothing and food but also financial assets—not only for actual eggs but also for nest eggs. The price of income-earning equities and real estate mattered, and if those asset prices were inflated or unstable, then it was a matter of significant concern for the economy.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Car companies shuttered forty assembly plants and 1,500 dealerships and laid off more than 700,000 autoworkers.29 The federal government saved Chrysler Corporation, the country’s third largest car manufacturing company, with a 1979–1980 bailout package worth $1.5 billion. Part of the auto industry’s crisis stemmed from Americans delaying purchases of new cars until oil prices stabilized. But another part signaled something far more ominous: Many consumers had decided to shift from American gas guzzlers to Japanese gas misers. By 1980, Japan and other foreign car manufacturers had cornered more than 25 percent of the US market. In that year, Japan actually sold more of its cars in the United States than it did at home.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Exxon’s rivals were less assured in court battles, and similarly lacked its confidence in their ability to cope with unpredicted price changes. In January 1997, fearing losses as oil prices unexpectedly fell, the industry dismissed some engineers, abandoned plans to recruit and train graduates, and canceled orders for new rigs. But in the spring prices stabilized, and fears of disaster evaporated. The oil companies began recruiting, paying bonuses and preparing for expansion. Some even forecast a boom. Over 1,000 oilmen crowded into the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans in early March 1997 to place bids for exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico. In the electric atmosphere, everyone wanted to play, and the US government pocketed $824 million, 58 percent more than the previous year.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

He found their lack of interest in exchange problems curious, particularly the little-Englander notion that “when the price of sterling changed in terms of other currencies, it was the other currencies that moved and not sterling.”39 Ruling Labour Party figures, such as Hugh Dalton and George Lansbury, similarly expressed no interest in fixing exchange rates, and were strongly opposed to any return to the gold-exchange standard. They shared Roosevelt’s belief that domestic price stabilization was far more important to economic recovery. Among economists, London School of Economics professors Lionel Robbins and T. E. Gregory took a very different position, advocating Britain’s return to gold “as soon as possible” at a rate of about $4.80 to the pound. The risk of not doing so, they believed, was a further decline in trade, a collapse of the sterling bloc owing to falling confidence in the currency, and a continued wave of beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations around the world.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

At some point, the high-frequency traders started withdrawing from the market, drying up liquidity while prices continued to fall. At 2:45 p.m., trading on the E-Mini was halted by an automatic circuit breaker, the exchange’s stop logic functionality. When trading was restarted, a mere five seconds later, prices stabilized and soon began to recover most of the losses. But for a while, at the trough of the crisis, a trillion dollars had been wiped off the market, and spillover effects had led to a substantial number of trades in individual securities being executed at “absurd” prices, such as one cent or 100,000 dollars.


Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom by van K. Tharp

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, computer age, distributed generation, diversification, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, high net worth, index fund, locking in a profit, margin call, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

Our current Federal Reserve Governor, Ben Bernanke, made the following remarks to the National Economists Club in November 2002: The second bulwark against deflation in the United States . . . is the Federal Reserve System itself. The Congress has given the Fed the responsibility of preserving price stability (among other objectives), which most definitely implies avoiding deflation as well as inflation. I am confident that the Fed would take whatever means necessary to prevent significant deflation in the United States and, moreover, that the U.S. central bank, in cooperation with other parts of the government as needed, has sufficient policy instruments to ensure that any deflation that might occur would be both mild and brief.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

This is the confidence Brash inspired. This success story quickly spread in central banking circles. Canada was next to adopt an inflation targeting strategy, in 1991, followed by Sweden and Britain. Many of the central banks chose a 2 percent target to allow for some flexibility even though genuine price stability would imply zero inflation. Citigroup estimates that fifty-eight countries (including the Eurozone members as one country) accounting for 92 percent of global GDP now have some sort of an inflation target. The qualification “some sort” is meant to cover banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has a dual mandate to target both stable prices and maximum employment.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Paying interest on excess balances should help to establish a lower bound on the federal funds rate by lessening the incentive for institutions to trade balances in the market at rates much below the rate paid on excess balances. Paying interest on excess balances will permit the Federal Reserve to provide sufficient liquidity to support financial stability while implementing the monetary policy that is appropriate in light of the System’s macroeconomic objectives of maximum employment and price stability.” See http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/ior_faqs.htm#4 (accessed March 5, 2012). The price tag for the Fed’s 0.25 percent interest rate paid on the current amount of excess reserves deposited with Reserve Banks—about $1.5 trillion—is likely almost $4 billion dollars a year. See, for excess reserves amount, the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of St.


pages: 571 words: 162,958

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

That he would send money and food back to his blighted land that now existed only in his mind, in his dreams, and in half-awake hallucinations of deserts, red and black saris, of women in dust, and their black hands and silver bangles, and their hunger, so many of the last memories of hunger. He had fantasized that he would smuggle Gita back across the shining sea, and bring her close to the accountants who calculated calorie burn quotas for the world. Close to the calories, as she had said, once so long ago. Close to the men who balanced price stability against margins of error and protectively managed energy markets against a flood of food. Close to those small gods with more power than Kali to destroy the world. But she was dead by now, whether through starvation or disease, and he was sure of it. And wasn’t that why Shriram had come to him?


pages: 740 words: 161,563

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

Brownian motion, deindustrialization, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Pasteur, New Economic Geography, Peace of Westphalia, price stability, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban sprawl

All the travellers spontaneously placed themselves at the side of the prettiest petitioner, to the vexation of the others, who were still trying to carry off those who lagged behind; but the former, like a good shepherdess, took care to keep them from her flock and successfully led it in its entirety to the Auberge du Léopard. The innkeeper might also be the postmaster, wood merchant, tobacconist and mayor. Despite these monopolies, prices stabilized remarkably quickly throughout the country, to the irritation of French travellers whose money was worth much less than pounds or dollars. Victor Hugo defined the innkeeper’s duties in Les Misérables: ‘bleed the man, fleece the woman, skin the child’; ‘know how much wear and tear a shadow causes the mirror and fix a rate for it.’


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And that outlook was sociopathic. Monetary Manipulation and Generational Expropriation Stuck in the middle of this freewheeling disaster is the Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy for the nation. Since 1977, it has been the unhappy duty of the Fed both to promote growth and ensure price stability (the “dual mandate”), while also serving as an important bank regulator.25 These goals often conflict, given that the Fed can overstimulate the economy by tolerating high inflation or allowing greater leverage. Reconciling these contradictions takes effort, subtlety, and character. However, as the Boomers took over Washington and the Fed, sociopathic thinking elided any contradictions in the dual (or triple) mandate.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Bad news hits that threatens the narrative. The story is crowded and early entrants think maybe the story is over so they take some profits. There is a meaningful pullback in price. This pullback shakes off the weaker and more recent buyers but those that believe in the narrative appear on the bid and the price stabilizes. Slowly, the importance of the bad news dissipates and price climbs back towards the highs. Stage 5: The final hype wave. As price breaks through and makes new highs, the narrative often goes into overdrive. Longs are emboldened by the price action and a strong feeling of FOMO comes over anyone that is not participating.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

See C.E.B. Borio, N. Kennedy, and S.D. Prowse, ‘Exploring Aggregate Price Formation across Countries: Measurement, Determinants and Monetary-Policy Implications’, BIS Economic Papers, no. 40 (Spring 1994), p. 46: ‘It has been widely accepted that the primary goal of monetary policy should be price stability.’ 27. See Armen A. Alchian and Benjamin Klein, ‘On a Correct Measure of Inflation’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1973), pp. 172–91. 7 Bernie Madoff: Frauds, Swindles, and the Credit Cycle 1. See Norman C. Miller, The Great Salad Oil Swindle (New York: Coward, McCann, 1965). 2.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

While he was, in Rowe’s terms, more “developmental” than Sima, there is little in his writings that suggests a Baconian belief in the progressive powers of useful knowledge (Rowe, 2001, p. 287). It is indeed striking that his discussion on “accumulation” includes almost nothing on an expansion of new productive assets and techniques, and it is instead wholly focused on the topic of price stabilization through granaries. 16 Even an author like Jack Goody, who goes out of his way to condemn “essentialist” interpretations of Chinese history, writes that “characteristic of the cultural history of China has been a constant looking back to the Confucian classics, to ‘Antiquity,’ providing a continuous point of reference for both conservatives and reformers” (Goody, 2009, p. 238). 17 Bray also notes (1984, p. 70) that Xu’s detailed program of reforming agricultural administration was never put into practice. 18 Darnton (1979) has estimated that in total, d’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopédie sold about 25,000 copies.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

A country with a very volatile exchange rate before joining the Euro must have an active and unstable monetary policy, which makes it too dissimilar. Too-high interest rates mean a country is not ready to be managed by a central bank with a much lower interest-rate target. TABLE 18.1 Member Requirements Source: ECB. 1. Price Stability An average annual inflation rate not exceeding 1.5% of the three best performing states. 2. Budget Control A budget deficit of less than 3% of GDP and a total public debt less than 60% of GDP. 3. Exchange Rate Control No severe tensions due to currency movements prior to entrance. 4. Similar Interest Rates An average nominal long-term interest rate not exceeding more than 2% of those of the three best performing members.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Milton Friedman and the Chicago School The late Milton Friedman is rightfully considered one of America’s leading monetary economists. Drawing on Irving Fisher’s influential work, University of Chicago economists Friedman and Anna Schwartz popularized the role of money in creating and establishing price stability as an important precondition for economic growth. Their 1963 book, A Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960, is considered a seminal work of economics, even though Friedman’s monetarism theory was hopeless as a practical guide to action.31 But Friedman didn’t stop with economic theory.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The mandate of Heaven meant that the state felt obliged to intervene in ecological and economic questions and also in ensuring the livelihood of the people. A striking example was the way the Qing during the eighteenth century managed granary reserves in order to ensure that the local laws of supply and demand worked in a reasonably acceptable fashion and produced relative price stability, a practice which dated back much earlier to the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and even before.53 The state also took on responsibility for what were, by the standards of the time, huge infrastructural projects, such as the maintenance of the Yellow River in order to prevent flooding, and the construction of the Grand Canal, which was completed at the beginning of the seventh century.54 In each of these respects, the Chinese state was very different from European states in that it assumed functions that the latter were only to regard as legitimate areas of concern many centuries later.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

Its organizational structure provided a solution to the basic question of what a governing bureaucracy should look like and what checks and balances were needed to incentivize and oversee government officials. It even specified an active financial role for the government. The Zhouli is charged with some of the activities described in the Guanzi—including price stabilization. It is also the oldest Chinese text to describe government credit. In the Zhouli, the government served as lender, not borrower. The treasury ministry was authorized to extend short-term loans to ordinary subjects to cover emergency costs, such as those for funerals. The implication of the Zhouli is that the government, not private moneylenders, should be making loans.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Until relatively recently, economists explained why some geographies grow wealthier than others by examining country-level differences: successful nations benefit from sound rule of law, stable prices, educated people, and so on. Lately, however, the more pressing question is why some regions within countries leave other regions so far behind as innovation hubs and generators of prosperity. It has long been obvious that one area can outperform others, as Silicon Valley has done; but the rule of law and price stability cannot explain why the Valley is more innovative than Montana or Michigan.[39] To understand the Valley’s secret, we need to update Ronald Coase’s framework: we must study venture-capital networks as deeply as we study markets and corporations. In a world of intensifying geoeconomic competition, the countries with the most creative innovation hubs are likely to be the most prosperous and ultimately the most powerful.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

When Lyndon Johnson laid down a 3.5 percent limit on wage increases throughout the United States, the IAM struck five airlines for 39 days and walked away with a 5.5 percent wage increase. The IAM made a mockery of President Nixon’s wage and price freeze. When Jimmy Carter’s wage “guidelines” became law, an IAM settlement at Eureka Vacuum Company was declared illegal by the Council on Wage and Price Stability. Charlie Bryan’s zeal for that tradition was evident the instant he assumed office. The outgoing district president, in a gracious newsletter offering congratulations to Bryan, added a sincere if awkwardly written farewell: “Mr. Frank Borman, whom I have the utmost respect for, was the company official, in my opinion, that did the most for Eastern Air Lines in the 31 years I have had an employee-employer relationship.”


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordie, J. R. 1983. “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500-1914.” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 26:483-505. Wray, L. Randall. 1990. Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. _____. 1998. Understanding Modern Money: the key to full employment and price stability. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham. _____. 1999. “An Irreverent Overview of the History of Money from the Beginning of the Beginning to the Present.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 21 (4): 679-687 _____. 2000. Credit and State Theories of Money. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Wright, David P. 2009.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Without this political cover, every decision to ease or restrict credit could be questioned by industrialists and merchants wanting easy money, on the one hand, or attacked as ‘monetary dictatorship’ from wage earners, on the other.46 The Economist was more frightened than Keynes about shining any light on the ‘grandmother of Threadneedle Street’, but it must be recalled that far from undermining the authority of the Bank of England or the Treasury, Keynes’s plan called for giving both more discretion to manage the economy for the sake of price stability. As a result, he could still in 1923 describe the Economist, in the Nation and Athenaeum, as a ‘gentle critic’ and ‘really with us on the main issue’.47 That began to change only when Churchill announced his intention to return to gold at the pre-war parity of $4.86 on 28 April 1925 – a move Keynes attacked in the Evening Standard, and then in The Economic Consequences of Mr.


pages: 1,057 words: 239,915

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

There was great fear that Germany’s precariously balanced political system would not withstand the kind of mass unemployment the British and American governments were inflicting on their populations. In any case, the reparations crisis of the spring of 1921 undid this temporary stabilization. After months of price stabilization, inflation resumed in June of that year and surged to double-digit figures in August. Nationalist economic opinion now insisted that excessive levels of reparations made any thought of stabilization absurd. France’s real intention was to ‘Ottomanize’ Germany, to reduce it to the kind of international debt-slavery used to subordinate the bankrupt Chinese and Ottoman empires.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The German Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, remarked with satisfaction in December 1991 that the treaty on Economic and Monetary Union ‘bears the German hallmark. Our stability policy has become the Leitmotif for the future European monetary order.’ A European Central Bank – it eventually came into being in June 1998 – would supervise monetary policy and oversee price stability. Countries preparing to enter the single currency had to meet ‘convergence criteria’ and join an exchange-rate mechanism (ERM) to hold currencies steady and interlinked. Government debt was not to exceed 60 per cent, annual deficits were to be no more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

If we recognize that inflation expectations in the 1970s and 1980s evolved amidst almost unprecedented structural uncertainty (the end of Bretton Woods, oil shocks, and other wrenching changes), rational learning models may be relevant. In a regime shift context, people may have adjusted too slowly to the probability of being in a high-inflation or low-inflation regime. • A few decades earlier, price stability was the long-run norm (zero inflation expectations and little persistence in annual inflation rates); by the 1970s, the level of and uncertainty regarding inflation were rising and so was its persistence; the inflation rate (as opposed to the price level) became close to a random walk. Only with hindsight do we know that all these aspects (inflation level, uncertainty, persistence) peaked around 1981 and that the Great Disinflation ensued.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Von Reden 2007, 81 (60 per cent of the population in a large stretch of Middle Egypt were cultivators; 40 per cent were part-time farmers). 19. Von Reden 2007, 148. 20. Von Reden 2007, 138 (quotations), 147–8. Faced with the dramatic fall in wages and income in the longer term (Scheidel 2010, 453; cf. Brewer 2007, 144) Von Reden 2010, ch. 6 emphasizes the price stability and a high degree of internal market integration in the 3rd century BCE in contrast to more intense fluctuations of prices in the 2nd (Ibid., 154). 21. Rowlandson 2001; Harper 2015; Erdkamp 2015. 22. Rathbone 1991; cf. Bagnall 1993. 23. Launaro 2015, 177. 24. Witzel 2006, 460–2. 25. Thapar 2002; Chakrabarti 2006 (at the same time there was also unfree labour). 26.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Wage rises and unemployment were related, with only one variable, import costs (as in the Korean War). In England, welfare benefits stopped wages from falling too low, and so demand for goods was kept up; government must surely maintain that demand to the point at which unemployment would never rise above 2.5 per cent. That way, there would be price stability, and men such as Alan Walters, wanting to make complicated calculations as to how much credit there was in the system were simply wasting time. The Phillips Curve dominated academic economics (or ‘discourse’). If anything went wrong, ran a further assumption, then price controls could be used - after all, they had been so used during the war, and operated, even by J.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Thomson also thought the use of 1,000 volts as the standard for executions too low, and he harbored a low opinion of Westinghouse. “The methods of the Westinghouse people are, as we know, of the most unfair and undignified character,” he declared, “and it would redound to our credit, I think, to let them keep to such methods.”35 March brought more good news to Edison when the French corner in copper collapsed and the price stabilized. The following month witnessed the birth of Edison General Electric, which relieved the inventor of his immediate cash strains. In May the public learned that Westinghouse dynamos would be used by the state prisons for the first execution. The victim would be William Kemmler, who had been convicted on May 10 of brutally murdering his wife— who was not really his wife—with an axe.


The Rough Guide to Wales by Rough Guides

back-to-the-land, country house hotel, land reform, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, trade route

NEURIN "EVAN THE POSTWAR ,ABOUR GOVERNMENT INSTITUTED THE .ATIONAL (EALTH 3ERVICE DRAMATICALLY IMPROVING HEALTH CARE IN 7ALES AND THE REST OF "RITAIN AND PROVIDING MUCH IMPROVED COUNCIL HOUSING 4HE NATIONALIZED COAL INDUSTRY NOW EMPLOYING LESS THAN HALF THE NUMBER OF TWENTY YEARS BEFORE WAS STILL THE MOST IMPORTANT EMPLOYER AT NATIONALIZATION BUT A GRADUAL PROCESS OF CLOSING INEFlCIENT MINES SAW THE NUMBER OF PITS DROP FROM IN TO IN AND JUST ONE IN 3ADLY THE SAME COMMIT MENT WASNT DIRECTED AT CLEANING UP THE SCARS OF OVER A CENTURY OF MINING UNTIL AFTER WHEN ONE OF SOUTH 7ALES MOST TRAGIC ACCIDENTS LEFT A SCHOOL AND CHILDREN BURIED UNDER A SLAG HEAP AT !BERFAN SEE P )N THE RURAL AREAS THE PRICE STABILIZATION THAT FOLLOWED THE !GRICULTURE !CT BROUGHT SOME RELIEF TO lNANCIALLY PRECARIOUS HILL FARMERS WHO WERE GIVEN FURTHER PROTECTION WITH THE FORMATION OF THE &ARMERS 5NION OF 7ALES IN ! MORE CONTROVERSIAL lLLIP CAME FROM THE SITING OF AN ALUMINIUM SMELTER AND TWO NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS IN NORTH 7ALES DUBIOUS BENElTS SOON ERODED BY THE CLOSURE OF MUCH OF THE RURAL RAIL SYSTEM FOLLOWING THE "EECHING 2EPORT IN $ESPITE THE SWITCH TO LIGHT MANUFACTURING AND THE IMPROVED AGRICULTURAL METHODS UNEMPLOYMENT IN 7ALES ROSE TO TWICE THE 5+ AVERAGE AND WOMEN CONTINUED TO BE GREATLY UNDER REPRESENTED !


pages: 992 words: 292,389

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

Roberts and his staff had pored through financial statements, and what they found wasn’t pretty. Cash flow in particular was a problem. Roberts had found two billion dollars in collateral posted by California traders that Enron had counted as cash from operations in 2000—money that was beginning to flow out of the door as energy prices stabilized. Then there were those related-party transactions. Enron was doing business with funds managed by a senior officer—a huge red flag. No Wall Street analyst seemed to know the details. But Roberts thought it was clear that a lot of questionable transactions had been conducted with these funds, all to manage and boost Enron’s earnings.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

It is the fellows that put out the paper and then break that do the mischief.’ By the mid nineteenth century the Bank had a monopoly on issuing notes, and the 1844 Bank Charter Act ensured that the Bank’s capital of £14 million was backed by gold coin or bullion, an arrangement that led to a long period of price stability. During this time the coinage was linked to the gold standard, but this was suspended during the First World War, and reintroduced only in 1925 after impassioned campaigning by the governor, Montagu Norman, although not with the full approval of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, who complained: ‘I’m lost and reduced to groping.’


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

That itself would double China’s GNP in less than ten years (a 10 percent rate would do the same in a mere seven years), yet for a number of reasons economic experts seem to feel that such a target can be achieved. In the first place, China’s rate of savings and investment has been consistently in excess of 30 percent of GNP since 1970, and while that in turn brings problems (it reduces the proportion available for consumption, which is compensated for by price stability and income equality, which in turn get in the way of entrepreneur ship), it also means that there are large funds available for productive investment. Secondly, there are huge opportunities for cost savings: China has been among the most profligate and extravagant countries in its consumption of energy (which caused declines in its quite considerable oil stocks), but its post-1978 energy reforms have substantially reduced the costs of one of industry’s main “inputs” and thus freed money for investments elsewhere—or consumption.37 Moreover, only now is China beginning to shake off the consequences of the Cultural Revolution.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

He and his partners had not created the conditions for the boom in railroad construction that made them so miraculously wealthy in the early 1880s. But they rode the boom as expertly and more effortlessly than they had the depression that preceded it. Receipts, which had languished through the mid-1870s, pyramided as steel prices stabilized, while production costs decreased with the addition of new labor-saving machinery. Profits at the Carnegie companies exploded from half a million dollars in 1879 to over $2 million in 1882, tracking rather precisely the increase in new track laid.6 As E. T. grew in size and profits, Tom Carnegie and Harry Phipps found themselves devoting more time to the steel concern and much less to the Lucy furnaces and the Union Iron Mills.