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 […]
Much has changed in the institutional organization of money markets since Fall 2012 when INET filmed my course “Economics of Money and Banking”, but what strikes me most is how well the fundamental analytical structure has held up. The two ideas that I identify as central to the “money view”—the importance of the daily settlement […]
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, […]
“I wouldn’t start from here,” the BIS never says explicitly in its recent Annual Report, but nevertheless it goes on to paint a rather comprehensive and compelling picture of a possible future toward which they think we should be trying to head, and of the present dysfunctional economic policies that are daily making it harder […]
[Remarks at Jack Treynor Memorial, MIT Chapel, June 19, 2016] “Jack has never been easy,” wrote Charles D. Ellis in 1981 as Jack stepped down from his position as editor of the Financial Analysts Journal which he had held since 1969. In Jack’s own departing words in the same issue of the FAJ, he described […]
In the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, most people thought that shadow banking was all in the past, and good riddance! Today, however, it is becoming clear that shadow banking is also in our future, even centrally so. The crisis was just one step toward that future, revealing weakness in order to force […]
The BIS and the IMF have each weighed in from the center, representing the perspectives of central banks and central Treasuries respectively. (Interestingly, they don’t agree, see here for a recent sample of the debate.) Now comes the periphery. The new Trade and Development Report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is titled “Making […]
On 13 September the BIS released its latest Quarterly Review placing emerging market vulnerabilities at centre stage. On 17 September, the FOMC voted against raising its target policy rate, citing near-term headwinds for the US coming from abroad. “Recent global economic and financial developments may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further […]
The recently released PwC “Global Financial Markets Liquidity Study”, sounds a warning. Financial regulation, while perhaps well-intentioned, has gone too far. Banks may be safer but markets are more fragile. At the moment, this fragility is masked by the massive liquidity operations of world central banks. But it will soon be revealed as, led by the Fed, […]
Does this sound familiar? Falling commodity prices, unsustainable official debts, crashing stock markets, pullback in global lending by dominant megabanks, misaligned currencies, plus a healthy dose of political dysfunction. These are the ingredients, according to Charles Kindleberger, that made for world depression in 1929-1939. “My contention is that the difficulty lay in considerable latent instability […]