Tag Archives: Notes

The ECB has published a first report on Stella, a joint research project with the Bank of Japan. The two banks are interested in potential roles that distributed ledger technology could play to support the financial market infrastructure. The report assesses whether existing payments systems could be safely and efficiently run on a distributed ledger. It concludes that a distributed-ledger-based system could meet the performance needs of real-time gross settlement systems, up to some...

On his blog, JP Koning offers two explanations for the surprisingly high rupee notes redemption rate—nearly 99%—after last year’s demonetization experiment: Money laundering, and a partial amnesty. Indians who had large quantities of illicit cash were able to contract with those who had room below their ceiling to convert illicit rupees on their behalf … Two weeks after the initial … announcement, the government introduced a formal amnesty for demonetized banknote holders. Any deposit of...

In Historia Mathematica, Daniel Mansfield and N.J. Wildberger argue that Plimpton 322, the Old Babylonian tablets, served as an exact ratio-based trigonometric table. … Instead, P322 is a trigonometric table of a completely unfamiliar kind and was ahead of its time by thousands of years. … we must adopt two ideas that are unique to the mathematical culture of the Old Babylonian (OB) period, between the 19th and 16th centuries B.C.E. First we abandon the notion of angle, and instead...

The Economist discusses the North-South divide in Germany which increasingly replaces the East-West division. The Southern states (Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony) do better along many dimensions. Germans in the southern states … go to better schools, get jobs more easily, earn more and live longer to enjoy it. Their governments have healthier finances, so they can invest more … crime rates are “strikingly” lower in the south....

More from the recent working paper by Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor (“The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015“). (Previous blog post about the return on residential real estate.) Return data for 16 advanced economies over nearly 150 years … …on the income and capital gains (and thus, total returns) from equities, residential housing, government bonds, and government bills. Real returns average 7% p.a. for equity, 8% for housing,...

On Alphaville, Matthew Klein discusses recent work by Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick, and Taylor (“The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015“) according to which Residential real estate, not equity, has been the best long-run investment over the course of modern history. … but they didn’t calculate the returns most homeowners actually experience. Most people borrow to buy housing and most people live in their properties without renting them out. This makes a big difference. … Net...

In the FT, Claire Jones reports about the German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision to refer a case against the European Central Bank’s PSPP program to the European Court of Justice. “In the view of the [court] significant reasons indicate that the ECB decisions governing the asset purchase programme violate the prohibition of monetary financing and exceed the monetary policy mandate of the European Central Bank.” … While Germany’s constitutional court said the OMT programme was...

In the NZZ, Simon Gemperli argues that Liechtenstein is doing better than Switzerland. Swiss tabloid Blick criticizes Liechtenstein. Previous, more positive NZZ articles about Liechtenstein: May 2014; March 2016; November 2016; April 2017.

In the FT, Mark Odell, Nick Megaw, and Stefan Wagstyl report about Air Berlin’s (ABX:GER) insolvency. This outcome will barely surprise Air Berlin passengers.