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The long view: The current war:

The Aztec capital reconstructed by Thomas Kole and collaborators:

How are SNB profits and losses distributed and what issues are debated? Annual Result Funds two “Reserves” The annual result (Jahresergebnis) of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is split into two parts. The first part funds “provisions for currency reserves” (Zuweisungen an Rückstellungen für Währungsreserven) which are meant to provide a buffer against future losses on the SNB’s asset positions. The second part funds current and future profit distributions to the Confederation and cantons...

In a speech, the ECB’s Fabio Panetta argues that a digital Euro is necessary because [i]n the digital age … banknotes could lose their role as a reference value in payments, undermining the integrity of the monetary system. Central banks must therefore consider how to ensure that their money can remain a payments anchor in a digital world. He argues that outsourcing the provision of central bank money [to stable coin providers] … would endanger monetary sovereignty [as would the absence...

David Baqaee in SED Newsletter, November 2021. Hulten’s theorem: … the elasticity of aggregate TFP to a microeconomic TFP shock is equal to the sales of the producer being shocked divided by GDP. … Furthermore, if labor supply is inelastic or if the definition of GDP is expanded to include the market value of leisure, then this irrelevance result also applies to real GDP (or under some additional assumptions to welfare). This result, oftentimes known as Hulten’s Theorem (Hulten, 1978), is...

Riksbank Research News 2021, December 2021. PDF (pp. 2–3), HTML. Q: You have been leader of the CEPR Research and Policy Network on FinTech and Digital Currencies since 2021 and explored issues at the heart of monetary theory and payment systems in your research. What do you think is new about digital central bank money and what makes it different from other digital means of payment? A: Societies have been using digital means of payment for decades. Commercial banks use digital claims...

Goodreads rating 4.19. Graeber’s book contains many interesting historical observations but lacks a concise argument to convince a brainwashed neoclassical economist looking for coherent arguments on money and debt. After 60 pages, 340 more seemed too much. Chapter one: … the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it man to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? …...

Goodreads rating 4.09. Enlightenment: Schon der Mythos ist Aufklärung, und: Aufklärung schlägt in Mythologie zurück. … Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils. … Als Sein und Geschehen wird von der Aufklärung nur anerkannt, was durch Einheit sich erfassen lässt; ihr Ideal ist das System, aus dem...

On German TV, Dieter Nuhr analyzes the German mindset (Nuhr im Wandel). He offers many insights into why Germans (and their government) stand in their own way. One reason is that Germans can deal with change but still fear it.

Goodreads rating 4.06. Human beings have their personal models of the world. These models are wrong and sometimes very wrong, leaving people with the impression that they have no choice, are being excluded, etc. The authors argue that successful psychotherapies and -therapists all use similar methods to help clients change and correct their models, opening new perspectives for them. In the book the authors systematize this argument. They emphasize errors that humans make when...