Homo appeared roughly 2 million years ago in Africa and Homo sapiens roughly 200’000 years ago in East Africa. Harari divides his account of the last 70’000 years into four parts: The cognitive revolution (language), the agricultural revolution (about 10’000 years ago in today’s Turkey, Iran, Levant), the unification of humankind (through money, empire, and religion), and the scientific revolution. According to Harari, Sapiens developed more efficient strategies for cooperation than other...
Read More »Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”
280 pages of frantic search for an end. New York, Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans, Mexico City, and the miles in between. Music, drugs, talk, sex. Wikipedia: Inspired by a 10000-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.In a letter to a student in 1961,...
Read More »Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”
280 pages of frantic search for an end. New York, Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans, Mexico City, and the miles in between. Music, drugs, talk, sex. Wikipedia: Inspired by a 10000-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.In a letter to a student in 1961,...
Read More »“Public versus Private Digital Money: Macroeconomic (Ir)relevance,” VoxEU, 2019
VoxEU, March 20, 2019, with Markus Brunnermeier. HTML. Both proponents and opponents have suggested that CBDC would fundamentally change the macroeconomy, either for the better or the worse. We question this paradigm. We derive an equivalence result according to which the introduction of CBDC need not alter the allocation nor the price system. And we argue that key concerns put forward in discussions about CBDC are misplaced. See also our VoxEU book chapter and my paper from last year.
Read More »“Public versus Private Digital Money: Macroeconomic (Ir)relevance,” VoxEU, 2019
VoxEU, March 20, 2019, with Markus Brunnermeier. HTML. Both proponents and opponents have suggested that CBDC would fundamentally change the macroeconomy, either for the better or the worse. We question this paradigm. We derive an equivalence result according to which the introduction of CBDC need not alter the allocation nor the price system. And we argue that key concerns put forward in discussions about CBDC are misplaced. See also our VoxEU book chapter and my paper from last year.
Read More »Objective Reality? Refuted
MIT Technology Review reports about the results of an experiment (arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080: Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World) suggesting that objective reality … does not exist. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality. The...
Read More »Objective Reality? Refuted
MIT Technology Review reports about the results of an experiment (arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080: Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World) suggesting that objective reality … does not exist. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality. The...
Read More »“Die SNB schuldet den Pensionskassen nichts (Nothing the SNB Owes to Pension Funds),” NZZ, 2019
NZZ, March 13, 2019. PDF. Updated: Ökonomenstimme, March 22, 2019. HTML. Long-term real interest rates do not reflect monetary policy. In the recent past, monetary policy has contributed to lower fixed-income interest rates but also to higher returns on other asset classes. Complaining about low rates but not adjusting one’s portfolio makes little sense; there is no “financial repression.” If politicians want to subsidize pension funds they should contribute funds from the government...
Read More »“Die SNB schuldet den Pensionskassen nichts (Nothing the SNB Owes to Pension Funds),” NZZ, 2019
NZZ, March 13, 2019. PDF. Long-term real interest rates do not reflect monetary policy. In the recent past, monetary policy has contributed to lower fixed-income interest rates but also to higher returns on other asset classes. Complaining about low rates but not adjusting one’s portfolio makes little sense; there is no “financial repression.” If politicians want to subsidize pension funds they should contribute funds from the government budget rather than asking the central bank to...
Read More »“Reserves For All? Central Bank Digital Currency, Deposits, and their (Non)-Equivalence,” IJCB
Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Central Banking. PDF. This paper offers a macroeconomic perspective on the “Reserves for All” (RFA) proposal to let the general public hold electronic central bank money and transact with it. I propose an equivalence result according to which a marginal substitution of outside money (e.g., RFA) for inside money (e.g., deposits) does not affect macroeconomic outcomes. I identify key conditions for equivalence and argue that these...
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