Official Money

The world took time to get into the money trap. But with one bound it can be free. Since the 1970s governments have tried various approaches to the challenges of managing money. In the 1970s, they put full employment top. They used monetary policies to expand demand, taking risks with inflation. The results included high…
» Continue Reading

States cannot create good money. They are interested parties. A good monetary system should discipline states – i.e. hold them to account. A state-run money cannot do that. That is the flaw in proposals such as those made by Positive Money and The International Movement for Monetary Reform. (Let me add, however, that I go…
» Continue Reading

12 points: 1. Central bankers, who were by and large not responsible for supervision pre-crisis , immediately sought to pin the blame for it on regulators, diverting attention from monetary policies – stoking the credit boom, failing to sound the alarm for what they were responsible for, which often included a duty to monitor the…
» Continue Reading

The lowest interest rates in history are failing to spur sustained recovery. Rather, low real rates mirror financial and structural weaknesses Economists cannot agree on the causes of these low real rates. They discuss various hypotheses. Central banks have held policy rates low for years – have these ultra low nominal rates reduced real rates,…
» Continue Reading

The current debate about monetary policies reminds me of the 1970s. Keynesian policies as then understood involved adjusting the fiscal “stance” of policy to ensure sufficient, but not excessive, effective demand. But these policies no longer had “traction”. The world was changing in ways that economists at the time struggled to understand.  Money was becoming…
» Continue Reading

Martin Wolf’s recent radio programme – “How Low can Rates Go?” – described and illustrated the dilemmas facing monetary policy-makers. Nine years from the start of the great financial crisis, Wolf reported, economies had still not returned to “normal”.  Capitalism was perceived by many to be failing to deliver; globalisation a con trick.  The political…
» Continue Reading

Henry Kissinger says that today’s international order was “founded upon conceptions that emerged from the British Isles, were carried by Europe around the world, and ultimately took deep root in North America” He adds that “American leadership in reinvigorating the contemporary order is imperative.” In a few words, Kissinger shows a depth of understanding and a…
» Continue Reading

  “Yesterday’s vote speaks to the ongoing changes and challenges that are raised by globalization,” President Obama said yesterday in his first comment on the UK referendum. He is right. The “Out” vote should be viewed as part of the geo-political fallout of the financial crisis and the failure of governments and bodies such as…
» Continue Reading

The vote for Brexit is about much more than the UK and Europe. It shows that new rules to guide the process of globalization are needed. The policies followed since the financial crisis have two major errors. First there is a failure to diagnose the true causes of the crisis. Second, governments have failed to…
» Continue Reading

According to the World Gold Council, Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, believes that in certain circumstances China’s assets in the US could be “annulled”. Mervyn King’s alarmist warning is  made in an interview, entitled “Present perilous, future imperfect” that appears in the June issue of Gold Investor,  a WGC publication.  After pointing…
» Continue Reading