April 3, 2020 AC is of course After-Coronavirus, and we need to distinguish short run from long run. In the short run, the most important thing to keep in mind is the highly differentiated impact of the crisis, both health and economic. The virus has hit different countries at different times, so recovery will not […]
March 26, 2020 If your cash inflows disappear but your cash outflows remain, what do you do? Dash for cash. Sell what you can for what you can, max out your contractual credit lines, and hold the proceeds in spendable form. The idea is to buy time by finding a way to continue to meet […]
A 2017-end post with this title might be thought to focus on bitcoin, and I will indeed have something to say about that, but in my view the bitcoin bubble is mostly a symptom of deeper trends that need to be uncovered first. Today money is global, so we can start pulling the string anywhere […]
What would Charlie have made of Brexit? Charles P. Kindleberger’s very last book-length effort was the slim volume titled Centralization versus Pluralism, a historical examination of political-economic struggles and swings within some leading nations (1996). In his frame, the historical struggles and swings he recounts–in the Dutch Republic, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, The United States, […]
“Governments propose, markets dispose,” as Charles Kindleberger liked to say. Starting next year the RMB will be included in the official SDR basket, and that inclusion will have some immediate automatic consequences for official government reserve holdings, but that’s all. History tells us that you don’t get to be a world reserve currency just because […]