Tag Archives: Notes

Echo der Zeit, SRF, 12 May 2023. HTML with link to audio file. Implications of capital injections and liquidity assistance for the federal government, the SNB, and Switzerland.

European Parliament, April 2023. PDF. Executive summary: The two progress reports provide an insightful overview over some of the thinking underlying the digital euro project. The reports remain vague in some respects, which is not surprising given the early stage of the project and the division of tasks between the ECB and the Commission. The first report suggests that the digital euro can help preserve public money as the anchor of the payment system, but it does not explain how the...

The Economist refers to our work in the `Free Exchange’ section: But some argue banks would work fine if the public switched their deposits for central-bank digital currencies, so long as the central bank stepped in to replace the lost funding. “The issuance of [such currencies] would simply render the central bank’s implicit lender-of-last-resort guarantee explicit,” wrote Markus Brunnermeier and Dirk Niepelt in 2019. This scenario seems to have partly materialised since the failure...

Recall this post from six years ago. Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor suggest that higher bank capital ratios help stabilize the financial system ex post but not ex ante, and that illiquidity breeds fragility.

With its annual report from a few weeks ago the SNB communicated minor changes in its monetary policy strategy (p. 24): The review of the monetary policy strategy showed that it has fundamentally proved its worth. There was no need to adjust the first two elements, namely the definition of price stability and the conditional inflation forecast. The strategy has enabled the SNB to fulfil its mandate of price stability well, despite repeated strong external shocks in recent years. The...

Swiss Banking proposes a “Deposit Token,” New Money for Switzerland. This white paper focuses on the question of how banks can best support the Swiss economy when it comes to settling transactions in digital assets and executing payments in a digitalised economy. As the digital transformation sweeps through the economy and society at large, it requires support from efficient, generally accepted and secure means of payment. Against this background and considering developments such as the...

An American professor’s perspective as reported on Irwin Collier’s Economics in the Rear-View Mirror: On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At a long table sat the Rector Magnificus, Harnack, the...

WKO guest professor at the University of Vienna. Public event on 19 January.

In one of the eBooks that CEPR published in 2022 several authors draw first conclusions. From the introduction by Jonathan Portes: The analyses in this eBook are very much a preliminary and incomplete account of the economic impacts of Brexit. In some cases, they raise as many questions as they answer.For example, why have UK imports of EU goods fallen so sharply, while UK exports are much less affected, when (in contrast to the EU) the UK has not yet introduced the full panoply of...

The New York Times collects background information about failures in Russia’s war against Ukraine.