Tag Archives: Notes

By Axel Leijonhufvud, September 1973, Economic Inquiry. The Econ tribe occupies a vast territory in the far North. Their land appears bleak and dismal to the outsider, and travelling through it makes for rough sledding; but the Econ, through a long period of adaptation, have learned to wrest a living of sorts from it. They are not without some genuine and sometimes even fierce attachment to their ancestral grounds, and their young are brought up to feel contempt for the softer living...

Tom Sargent describes how he learnt macroeconomics the Lucas way, starting from the Cowles Commission approach and digesting Muth’s (or Richardson’s?) rational expectations.

An executive order dated March 9, 2022 outlines what is on the White House’s mind: The United States has an interest in responsible financial innovation, expanding access to safe and affordable financial services, and reducing the cost of domestic and cross-border funds transfers and payments, including through the continued modernization of public payment systems.  We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business...

Henley & Partners lists what is costs. A growing number of countries host residence and citizenship by investment programs (also known as golden visa programs) that offer a variety of attractive investment options designed to cater to each family’s unique requirements. In an unsettled, ever-changing world, wealthy individuals need a plan B for themselves and their families — one that offers them a safer place to live in times of crisis, while also providing them with greater access to...

In a speech, the ECB’s Fabio Panetta argues that a digital Euro is necessary because [i]n the digital age … banknotes could lose their role as a reference value in payments, undermining the integrity of the monetary system. Central banks must therefore consider how to ensure that their money can remain a payments anchor in a digital world. He argues that outsourcing the provision of central bank money [to stable coin providers] … would endanger monetary sovereignty [as would the absence...

CEPR and SUERF webinar moderated by me. Markus Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau present their report for the European Parliament. Youtube.

Goodreads rating 4.19. A sweeping novel of 950 pages (!) which starts on page 960. The Nobel laureate describes hundreds of characters, with even more names; immerses in countless locations, languages, and creeds. Her protagonists always remain strangers. There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as candy. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among...

The new edition features an interview with Javier Bianchi. PDF. It is “my” last Newsletter since I left the Center yesterday.

On the question whether the Fed should seriously consider retail CBDC, the FT sides with the pro camp. While elsewhere such central bank digital currencies can appear “a solution in search of a problem”, America’s lacklustre retail banking system and the importance of the dollar in cross-border money flows make an obvious case for reform. Compare the contributions by Darrell Duffie and Chris Waller in the CEPR eBook.

Blog post by Dave Peck and the PSL team. Some issues they discuss: Very few categories of data belong on-chain … Today’s smart contract programming models are deeply flawed … Smart contracts can’t reference the “real-world”. They can only reference the blockchain itself. This is known as the “oracle problem” and it makes blockchains a necessarily closed system. This may sound like a trivial problem, but it is actually profound. For instance, it forces smart contract developers to jump...