December 2011

Happy New Year

31 December 2011

Happy New Year 2012 and it is a nice opportunity for me to thank you much for visiting my blog. (Card courtesy: Hallmark) Hyman Minksy and Money Did Hyman Minsky truly understand the endogenous nature of money? The Levy Institute is one my favourite places in the world, but have been there only once :(. [...]

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Design Changes

29 December 2011

Made a few changes in my site design such as background colour, flash tags, favicon etc. Also, added a section “Aspiration” on top. Removed the default images of the Thesis theme and added two figures – this is explained in the page Multimedia Box. Also, you can subscribe to my blog via Feedburner. Follow this [...]

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Merry Christmas

24 December 2011

Merry Christmas to all! (card courtesy Hallmark) I have been reading this article/blog post The Curse of Tina by Adam Curtis of the BBC – it’s a long article and there are several videos in the post, making it a long read. What led me into the article was the discussion of policies put forward by Monetarists [...]

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Today’s Eurosystem LTRO

21 December 2011

On 8 Dec, the European Central Bank announced that it will conduct two Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO) with a maturity of 36 months – one each in December and February. According to the initial press release, The operations will be conducted as fixed rate tender procedures with full allotment. The rate in these operations will [...]

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Who Is Germany?

18 December 2011

In recent posts on the Eurosystem, I looked at how it operates and in The Eurosystem: Part 2 highlighted how capital flow across borders within the Euro Area has led to a large accumulation of TARGET2 balances by some NCBs such as the Deutsche Bundesbank. Bloomberg Businessweek had an article Germany’s Hidden Risk recently on this: [...]

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Christine Lagarde’s Warning

16 December 2011

FT has an article today on Christine Lagarde’s warning about a 30s style depression and that faces the prospect of “economic retraction, rising protectionism, isolation and . . . what happened in the 30s [Depression]” The video is below. Lagarde’s speech starts at 13:00 and ends at 25:25 Lagarde rightly stresses the “vast interconnectedness” between [...]

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Macdougall Report

15 December 2011

Charles Goodhart and Dirk Schoenmaker just released their article on a game plan for saving the Euro, which is approaching its endgame. According to them, An EZ Minister of Finance without money is like an emperor without clothes. There are proposals to have tax capacity capable of funding a budget of about 2% of European [...]

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Martin Wolf On EU Summit

14 December 2011

Excellent analysis of the EU Summit by Martin Wolf on FT using the sectoral balances approach: … Let me make this point by turning last week’s analysis of the balance of payments into one of foreign, private and government financial balances in eurozone members (see charts). To remind readers: these have to add up to [...]

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The Eurosystem: Part 5

11 December 2011

This is the fifth part of the series of posts on the description of the Eurosystem. In this post, I will discuss whatever I had kept postponing in previous posts – except central bank swaps, which I will postpone to Part 6. [Links for previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] The [...]

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Common Sense … Huh?

11 December 2011

According to Koen Doens, Head of the Spokespersons’ Service of the European Commission (via Twitter): @BrunoBrussels Since common sense hasn’t prevailed before, it’s best to enshrine it in law. — Koen Doens (@ECspokesKoen) December 11, 2011 He was referring to a presentation in the European Commission’s website and (first 5 pages of 9) below: (Click each [...]

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