Dirk Niepelt

In a CEPR discussion paper Christian Bayer, Chi Kim, Alexander Kriwoluzky analyze redenomination risk during the European debt crisis and how the European Central Bank’s interventions affected this risk. They conclude that the risk fell in the case of Italy but increased for France and Germany. From the abstract: … first estimate daily default-risk-free yield curves for French, German, and Italian bonds that can be redenominated and for bonds that cannot. Then, we extract the compensation...

Radio Bern RaBe, May 15, 2018. HTML with link to podcast (interview starts at 08:15). Interview with Radio Bern RaBe about Vollgeld and the Vollgeld initiative.

According to René Scheu in the NZZ. Die zehn «Massregeln» für die «fortgeschrittensten Länder», in die das «Kommunistische Manifest» mündet, lesen sich aus heutiger Sicht wie ein sozialdemokratisches Programm, dem auch viele softbürgerliche Politiker sogleich vorbehaltlos zustimmen würden. Starke Progressivsteuer, Geldmonopol der Nationalbank, Zentralisation des Transportwesens, nationale Industriepolitik, Verstaatlichung des Bauernstandes und unentgeltliche Erziehung aller Kinder gehören...

SRF, April 28, 2018. HTML with link to audio file (interview starts at 13:15). Interview with Swiss public radio about Vollgeld and the Vollgeld initiative.

On their blog, Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz voice doubts regarding the usefulness of universal central bank digital currency (U-CBDC). They argue: … in an effort to retain their deposit base, commercial banks would surely raise the interest rate they offer to their customers relative to the rate on U-CBDC. … the introduction of U-CBDC would cause a substantial fraction of deposits to shift to the central bank, with the remainder prone to exit in a period of financial stress. …...

Central bankers often argue that CBDC would increase the risk of bank runs. On his blog, JP Koning rejects this notion. After all, he retorts, during a confidence crisis bank customers would no longer have to queue to withdraw cash; lender of last resort support would be provided much more quickly; and “large” cash holders would continue to shift funds into treasury bills, not into CBDC. Koning writes: The general criticism here is that during a crisis, households and businesses will...

In the NZZ, Werner Enz reports that the insurance company AXA will stop offering “Vollversicherungen.” One motivation relates to the fact that the second pillar in the Swiss pension system is increasingly abused, with redistribution undermining supposedly “individual” accounts.

finews.ch, April 9, 2018. PDF. Andreas Britt interviewed me. I describe the consequences of “Reserves for All” and point to potential benefits.

A reminder not to be overly impressed when presented with statistically significant coefficients, from FiveThirtyEight.com.

A global heat map based on data collected by the Strava fitness app, representing 700 million activities; a total distance of 16 billion km; and a total recorded activity duration of 100 thousand years.