Tag Archives: Notes

In the FT (Alphaville), Marcello Minnena explains what type of currency denominations of Euro area sovereign debt constitute credit events; and how markets assess the risk of such denominations. After the Greek default in 2012 new ISDA standards entered into force: contracts made since 2014 protect against euro area countries redenominating their debt into new national currencies [unless the debt is redenominated] into a reserve currency: the US dollar, the Canadian dollar, the British...

In the FT, David Pilling reports about Somalia which has managed without central bank issued money for decades. … up to 98 per cent of local banknotes are fake … With the help of the International Monetary Fund, Mogadishu plans to print official banknotes for the first time in more than a quarter of a century … No official Somali currency has left the presses since the Horn of Africa nation descended into clan warfare after the collapse of the government in 1991. … warlords, businessmen...

A blog post on Random Critical Analysis argues that high wealth (proxied by high consumption) rather than GDP explains US health care expenditures. Total per capita health care spending increases as wealth increases because people actually demand more goods and services (volume) per capita and because it is relatively labor intensive sector that does not enjoy the productivity gains found in some other sectors of the economy, i.e., overall costs increase through both volume and price...

In separate blog posts, Russ Roberts and John Cochrane have called for humility on the part of economists. Asking “What do economists know?,” Roberts and Cochrane point out—correctly—that economics is not as strong on quantification as some economists and many pseudo economists pretend, and as is often expected from economists. Economics is not the same as applied statistics although the latter can help clarify, at least to some extent, the empirical relevance of economic theories....

In the FT, Mehreen Khan reports about the resurgence of deposit flight.

The Economist reports about the fintech revolution in China. By just about any measure of size, China is the world’s leader in fintech (short for “financial technology”, and referring here to internet-based banking and investment). It is far and away the biggest market for digital payments, accounting for nearly half of the global total. It is dominant in online lending, occupying three-quarters of the global market. A ranking of the world’s most innovative fintech firms gave Chinese...

In the FT, Tim Harford (here) and Martin Sandbu (here) review Kenneth Arrow’s monumental contributions to economics.

Sweden’s tabloid Aftonbladet (in English) about what happened on Friday, 17 February 2017 in Sweden (nothing extraordinary).

The IMF has released a report with an ex-post evaluation of Greece’s 2012 Extended Fund Facility (Exceptional Access under the 2012 Extended Arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility with Greece). A critical discussion by Charles Wyplosz on VoxEU. The Greek authorities are more optimistic than IMF staff about the economy’s outlook.

On Bank Underground, Gene Kindberg-Hanlon criticizes the secular stagnation hypothesis: Real interest rates have fallen by around 5 percentage points since the 1980s.  Many economists attribute this to “secular” trends such as a structural slowdown in global growth, changing demographics and a fall in the relative price of capital goods which will hold equilibrium rates low for a decade or more (Eggertsson et al., Summers, Rachel and Smith, and IMF).  In this blog post, I argue this...