Tag Archives: finance
Fred Bergsten calls for monetary reform
Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute is the “enfant terrible” of US international monetary and economic debate. Fending off the passing years, it is a role he has played with great panache for the best part of half a century. Always at the centre of things, always provocative, frequently infuriating, he has, as head of the…
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The Fed at 100
The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by President Wilson on December 23 1913. Its purposes were “To provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”…
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Goodhart’s cry of despair
Five years after the international banking system fell into the arms of the central banks and governments, there is still a paralysing uncertainty about the extent and cost of regulation, the viability of banking models and the monetary policy regime. More about financial regulation and banking models in future columns. Now let us look…
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My New Year wishes
The world economic recovery remains fragile and could easily be derailed by renewed financial turmoil. My first wish is a terminological one – please, can we find a more useful word or phrase to describe what has happened? The word “crisis” and the phrases “financial crisis” , “great financial crisis”, “Global Financial Crisis” ,…
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What Osborne should have said
George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made an autumn statement in the House of Commons yesterday. This is what he should have said. Mr Speaker, Honourable Members, Successive governments have allowed the problems related to and in part caused by the operations of banks in this country to drag on. No solution is in…
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Eurozone to lead world out of the money trap?
There is a long, long way to go. But confidence is gradually returning to the eurozone – confidence that at least a break-up of the eurozone will be avoided (thought his does not exclude the possibility that Greece may leave). The fall in spreads on Spanish and Italian bonds over German bunds is one…
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Tectonic plates shift
There is a short and a long-term way to view the debate on structural reforms in banking. Short term, the question is, will the EU’s Liikanen knock out the UK’s Vickers? Or will Vickers prevail? The recommendations are mirror images of each other, one ring-fencing so-called retail banking the other ring-fencing the investment banking bit….
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Discredited central bankers caught in the money trap
Central banking used to be an august profession – highly respected, almost reverred, mainly because they looked after everybody’s money. But now that Wall Street can rake in more money than God, and the Fed and European Central Bank are still printing money to keep their economies from deflating, central bankers have lost their god-like…
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Towards the next crash
The political tide is backing off the banks. Few politicians in Europe or the US are willing to support moves for more radical reform. They just want to get the banks lending again. In practice, that means pressing banks to accept the risk of big bad debts down the road…and so set the stage for…
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Did unethical conduct cause the crisis?
Dropped in to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) to hear a talk by Dr Elaine Sternberg (she is the author of “Just Business: Business Ethics in Action”, a research fellow of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics at Leeds University and IEA’s corporate governance guru; not many philosophers have also been entrepeneurs…
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