Dirk Niepelt

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.

noyb.eu. Many companies ignore the stringent privacy laws in Europe. This is possible, because it is too complicated and expensive for individual users to claim their rights. noyb will close the gap between law and the reality by collectively enforcing your rights, so that your rights become reality.

Kontantupproret (“cash rebellion”) in Sweden—not everybody is pleased with the prospect of a cashless society. David Crouch reports in The Guardian.

The Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control has published a special issue with the papers of the conference on “Fiscal and Monetary Policies” that the Study Center Gerzensee co-organized with the JEDC, the St. Louis Fed, the University of Bern, and the Swiss National Bank. This earlier post contains a link to the conference program.

In a Staff Working Paper, the Bank of England’s Philip Bunn, Alice Pugh, and Chris Yeates discuss how monetary policy easing following the financial crisis affected income and wealth of different age groups. The authors analyze survey panel data (ONS Wealth and Assets Survey) on households’ characteristics and balance sheet positions. They argue that the overall effect of monetary policy on standard relative measures of income and wealth inequality has been small. Given the pre-existing...

A BIS report submitted by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the Markets Committee discusses potential implications of the introduction of central bank digital currency for payments, monetary policy, and financial stability. From the executive summary … CBDC is potentially a new form of digital central bank money that can be distinguished from reserves or settlement balances held by commercial banks at central banks. There are various design choices for a CBDC,...

In the FT, Martin Arnold reports about plans to launch “Saga,” a reserves-backed krypto currency, maybe the closest substitute yet to central bank digital currency. It is being launched by a Swiss foundation with an advisory board featuring Jacob Frenkel, … Myron Scholes, … and Dan Galai, co-creator of the Vix volatility index. The currency aims to avoid the wild price swings of many cryptocurrencies by tethering itself to reserves deposited in a basket of fiat currencies at commercial...

In the FT, Mehreen Khan and Aliya Ram report that MasterCard and IBM plan to create a “data trust” to allow businesses with EU customers to meet the strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provisions that come into effect by the end of May. “Truata” will be based in Dublin. The independent company, called Truata, will manage, anonymise and analyse vast amounts of personal information held by companies such as travel agents and insurers in a way that is compliant under the EU’s...

NZZ, March 15, 2018. PDF. CBDC is not the same as krypto currencies. Easy arguments against CBDC are misleading. Switzerland should not dismiss CBDC too quickly. (The title of the article is misleading, it is not mine. I argued for openness in the discussion rather than for adoption.)