Tag Archives: Notes

In the Berner Zeitung, Mischa Aebi reports that many firms have closed their accounts at WIR-bank. The bank had imposed new requirements stipulating that account holders must accept at least 3% of their sales to be paid in WIR money.

On his blog, John Cochrane discusses the possibility of an alternative monetary policy regime in which the Fed tightly controls expected inflation. He states, repeatedly, that given our current understanding of the matter he would refrain from implementing such a regime if he became Fed chair (rather than stating that he would not currently advise to move in that direction). Given that Janet Yellen is expected to retire next year and John Cochrane is mentioned as a possible successor, I...

Shop window in Turin.

On Bloomberg, Yuji Nakamura and Lulu Yilun Chen report about conflicting views in the Bitcoin community on how to address capacity limits in the blockchain. Bitcoin Unlimited is essentially a software upgrade to the blockchain. Years ago, bitcoin’s early developers imposed a cap on the amount of data it could process. While that slowed down the network, it was seen as a necessary safety measure against potential attackers who could overload the system. Now, Unlimited supporters say the...

After nine years, Iceland has lifted its remaining capital controls. In the FT, Richard Milne reports. Exchange rate vis-a-vis the Euro.

In his book, Julian Baggini points out that materialism, not determinism, undermines the notion of free will. He accepts that man is subject to the laws of nature but simultaneously seems to argue for a holistic model of man and human choice. He concludes that the concept of free will is consistent with predetermined causes; with unconscious choice; and that it does not require that a choice could have been different. Discussion in The Guardian.

Journalist and business school professor Miriam Meckel describes how, when forced to slow down in a burnout clinic, she discovers yoga, meditation, and family constellations (Familienstellen). She also thinks about prejudice, the role of workers, and hand written letters.

In Douglas Adams’ book (volume one in the trilogy of four) we learn, among other things: Towels are particularly useful for interstellar travelers on a shoestring. It’s not clear whether humans conduct experiments on mice or vice versa. The answer to Life, Universe, and Everything is “forty-two” as Deep Thought found after an extended period (seven and a half million years) of number crunching. But what is the question? To find out, an even more powerful computer was built: The Earth....

On VoxEU, Luca Benati, Robert Lucas, Juan Pablo Nicolini, and Warren Weber argue that long-run money demand in many countries is rather stable. … using a specific, narrow monetary aggregate, M1, we study a dataset comprising 32 countries since the mid-19th century (Benati et al. 2016). The main finding of this large-scale investigation is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, in most cases statistical tests do identify with high confidence a long-run equilibrium relationship between...

In the NZZ, Michael Schaefer reports on a study about the performance of Swiss portfolio managers in 2016. The median portfolio returns in all investment strategies except those not investing in stocks fell short of the corresponding benchmark returns. Only a fifth of the portfolios generated returns in excess of their benchmark. These numbers do not yet account for management fees. No portfolio manager generated high returns across all strategies. But some managers consistently generate...