Tag Archives: Notes

On their blog, Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz voice doubts regarding the usefulness of universal central bank digital currency (U-CBDC). They argue: … in an effort to retain their deposit base, commercial banks would surely raise the interest rate they offer to their customers relative to the rate on U-CBDC. … the introduction of U-CBDC would cause a substantial fraction of deposits to shift to the central bank, with the remainder prone to exit in a period of financial stress. …...

Central bankers often argue that CBDC would increase the risk of bank runs. On his blog, JP Koning rejects this notion. After all, he retorts, during a confidence crisis bank customers would no longer have to queue to withdraw cash; lender of last resort support would be provided much more quickly; and “large” cash holders would continue to shift funds into treasury bills, not into CBDC. Koning writes: The general criticism here is that during a crisis, households and businesses will...

In the NZZ, Werner Enz reports that the insurance company AXA will stop offering “Vollversicherungen.” One motivation relates to the fact that the second pillar in the Swiss pension system is increasingly abused, with redistribution undermining supposedly “individual” accounts.

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,...