Dirk Niepelt

In the FT, Mehreen Khan reports about the IMF’s conditional acceptance to lend to Greece. The IMF’s “agreement in principle” (AIP) tool draws on a practice where the fund is able to greenlight its involvement in a debtor country, conditional on the government and its creditors agreeing to future debt relief measures. Of course, the dispute about the merits of debt relief is unresolved. The IMF thinks Greek debt is ‘unsustainable’ and the European creditors should bear more losses, earlier...

In the Berner Zeitung, Johannes Reichen reports about planned maintenance work on Lake Gerzensee’s overflow. The Study Center (which owns the lake located on the territory of three communities) is portrayed as an institution that could have given more money … Interested parties are welcome to inquire if they wish to know more.

In a paper, Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, and Noam Yuchtman argue that the Protestant reformation after the year 1517 triggered major reallocation, due to religious competition and political economy. [T]he Reformation produced rapid economic secularization. … shift in investments in human and fixed capital away from the religious sector. Large numbers of monasteries were expropriated … particularly in Protestant regions. This transfer of resources shifted the demand for labor...

During the black death epidemic (1349–1353), atmospheric lead concentration collapsed as mining ceased. This is the result of a study by Alexander More, Nicole Spaulding, Pascal Bohleber, Michael Handley, Helene Hoffman, Elena Korotkikh, Andrei Kurbatov, Christopher Loveluck, Sharon Sneed, Michael McCormick, and Paul A. Mayevski on lead levels in an Alpine glacier. They write that [c]ontrary to widespread assumptions, … resolution analyses of an Alpine glacier reveal that true historical...

In the Trustlines Network every user is acting as a bank by granting credit lines to friends they trust. This allows to issue people powered money between friends and facilitate secure payments between strangers, by sending payments along a chain of trusting friends. Think of IOUs or cheques and netting in the blockchain.

In the FT, Martin Arnold reports about a new cross-border payment method tested by the Bank of England. The “interledger” program transfers money “near-instantaneously and without settlement risk.” The Bank of England set up two simulated RTGS systems on a cloud computing platform, using the Ripple interledger to simultaneously process “a successful cross-border payment”. This is not necessarily good news for the blockchain community. The Bank of England’s proof of concept is “about...

On his blog, Tony Yates raises the question whether the general public has a right to use central bank issued electronic money? Because of inclusion considerations? Or because providing cash and reserves is a central government function?

In its July 2017 Monetary Policy Report, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System discusses monetary policy rules. On pp. 36–38, the Board argues that [t]he small number of variables involved in policy rules makes them easy to use. However, the U.S. economy is highly complex, and these rules, by their very nature, do not capture that complexity. … Another issue related to the implementation of rules involves the measurement of the variables that drive the prescriptions...

Panel discussion with Ernst Baltensperger, Otmar Issing, Fritz Zurbrügg and Mark Dittli (moderator) on the occasion of the publication of the Festschrift in honour of Ernst Baltensperger, Bern, June 16, 2017. SNB press release. Video (SNB Forschungs-TV).

On his blog, John Kay speculates about the future of financial intermediation: The paradox of modern capital markets is that although there is less and less need for market activity from the point of view of either the end users of finance, or the investors who are the ultimate beneficiaries of finance, the volume of market activity has increased exponentially. … The growth of secondary market trading at the expense of an understanding of the underlying exposure led to disaster in the...