Tag Archives: Contributions

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

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...

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.)

In a CEPR discussion paper, Christoph Trebesch and Jeromin Zettelmeyer argue that ECB bond buying had a large impact on the price of short and medium maturity bonds … However, the effects were limited to those sovereign bonds actually bought. We find little evidence for positive effects on market quality, or spillovers to close substitute bonds, CDS markets, or corporate bonds. A multiple equilibria view of the crisis would probably suggest otherwise.

In the NZZ, Peter Fischer reports that SNB president Thomas Jordan rejects the Vollgeld initiative and stops short of endorsing the ‘reserves for all’ proposal. … wehrt sich die Nationalbank auch gegen Vorschläge aus akademischen Kreisen, die von der Nationalbank fordern, nicht mehr nur Banken, sondern auch direkt den Schweizer Bürgern elektronisches Zentralbankgeld zur Verfügung zu stellen. Am einfachsten ginge dies,...

In the NZZ, Peter Fischer reports that SNB president Thomas Jordan rejects the Vollgeld initiative and stops short of endorsing the ‘reserves for all’ proposal. … wehrt sich die Nationalbank auch gegen Vorschläge aus akademischen Kreisen, die von der Nationalbank fordern, nicht mehr nur Banken, sondern auch direkt den Schweizer Bürgern elektronisches Zentralbankgeld zur Verfügung zu stellen. Am einfachsten ginge dies, wenn jedermann bei der SNB ein Konto halten könnte. Jordan warnt...

Finanz und Wirtschaft, December 13, 2017. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, December 15, 2017. HTML. Regulation is about aligning private and social trade-offs. When banks cause negative externalities, good regulatory interventions increase banks’ costs. Externalities may differ across countries, so nothing suggests that regulation induced costs should be the same internationally.

It’s the time of the year when financial advisors feel obliged to produce forecasts for the coming year. This is often a waste of time, for the writers and the readers. In the Wall Street Journal, James Mackintosh writes that [f]orecasting is difficult, but this year showed exactly how pointless it can be: Markets performed opposite of virtually all predictions. Previous blog post.

NZZ, November 16, 2017. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, November 20, 2017. HTML. On money creation. Some misconceptions. Why money is less special than commonly thought.

In the Boston Review, Dani Rodrik discusses neoliberalism and argues that mainstream economics shades too easily into ideology, constraining the choices that we appear to have and providing cookie-cutter solutions. Rodrik emphasizes that sound economics implies context specific policy recommendations. And therein lies the central conceit, and the fatal flaw, of neoliberalism: the belief that first-order economic principles map onto a unique set of policies, approximated by a...