Dirk Niepelt

On his blog, JP Koning discusses the versatility of cheques: A cheque instructs a bank to transfer deposits. It is a derivative on bank deposits. A post dated cheque serves as debt instrument, e.g., vis-a-vis pay day lenders. An uncashed cheque may serve as money if marked “to bearer” or endorsed by the recipient. Laws grant cheques currency status. A cheque may be used for payments even if other payment mechanisms break down. During the Irish banking strike of 1970, “for six months...

On his blog (here and here), JP Koning discusses currency status: … laws that … grant … currency status. … Say that person A is carrying some sort of financial instrument in their pocket and it is stolen. The thief uses it to buy something from person B, who accepts it without knowing it to be stolen property. If the financial instrument has not been granted currency status by the law, then person B will be liable to give it back to person A. If, however, the instrument is currency, then...

On VoxEU, Mary Amiti, Emmanuel Farhi, Gita Gopinath, and Oleg Itskhoki discuss a border adjustment tax and its consequences. … a border adjustment tax … would make export sales deductible from the corporate tax base, while expenditure on imported goods would not be deductible … Therefore, if the border adjustment extends to all imports and exports, it is akin to a combination of a uniform import tariff and an export subsidy on all international trade … … it would limit the incentives for...

In: Thomas Moser, Carlos Lenz, Marcel Savioz and Dirk Niepelt, editorial committee, Monetary Economic Issues Today, Festschrift in Honour of Ernst Baltensperger, Swiss National Bank/Orell Füssli, Zürich, June 2017. PDF of draft. The sovereign money initiative (Vollgeldinitiative) seeks to gain greater control over the money and credit supply, to increase financial stability and to achieve a fairer distribution of seigniorage income. The initiative’s suggested approach – a ban on active...

Festschrift in Honour of Ernst Baltensperger, Swiss National Bank/Orell Füssli, Zürich, June 2017, with Thomas Moser, Carlos Lenz, and Marcel Savioz, editorial committee. Publisher’s website. From the publisher’s website: »Eine Welt ohne ein gut funktionierendes Zahlungssystem, ohne Geld- und andere Wertaufbewahrungsanlagen, ohne zuverlässige Recheneinheit, das wäre eine Welt mit einem viel tieferen Wohlstandsniveau,in der wir nicht mehr leben möchten.« Ernst Baltensperger Ursachen und...

IMF Working Paper 17/119, May 2017, with Tamon Asonuma and Romain Ranciere. PDF. Rejecting a common assumption in the sovereign debt literature, we document that creditor losses (“haircuts”) during sovereign restructuring episodes are asymmetric across debt instruments. We code a comprehensive dataset on instrument-specific haircuts for 28 debt restructurings with private creditors in 1999–2015 and find that haircuts on shorter-term debt are larger than those on debt of longer maturity....

Dave Birch blogs about the concept of legal tender: a means to discharge debt. … you cannot force a retailer to accept legal tender or indeed any other form of tender. If, however, you buy something from them and there is no contractual barrier to the use of any form of tender, and you offer legal tender in payment, and they refuse it, then they cannot enforce the debt in court. That’s what legal tender means: it’s about discharging debts. If you incur a debt you can discharge it with...

The Economist reports about research on quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity which suggests that causality is a dubious concept. … it is no longer only location in space that becomes uncertain, but also location in time. Often, therefore, it would no longer be possible to say which of two events came first.

The Economist reports about plans for Monte dei Paschi’s future: … retail investors in the bank’s junior bonds, many of them ordinary customers. European state-aid rules say that they should lose their money along with shareholders. Technically, they will. In fact, to preserve their savings and avoid a political outcry, they will be deemed to have been “mis-sold” the bonds: they will receive shares which will in turn be swapped for new, safer bonds. Italy has to come up with a...

In a (December 2015) Bank of England Staff Working Paper, Lukasz Rachel and Thomas Smith dissect the global decline in long-term real interest rates over the last thirty years. A summary of their executive summary: Market measures of long-term risk-free real interest rates have declined by around 450bps. Absent signs of overheating this suggests that the global neutral rate fell. Expected trend growth as well as other factors affecting desired savings and investment determine the neutral...