Monthly Archives for April 2008
Explaining the US Housing Market – Cole Kendall
Cole Kendall has created a very well-researched series of articles on the US Housing Market on his blog Understanding the Market. As an introduction, he asks How Many Houses are there in the US?: The US has around 125 million … Continue reading
Project: Mapping the Financial Governance
When academics, analysts and scholars analyze the causes and remedies for the current credit crisis, most of them analyze macro-economic trends such as exchange rate movements, or micro-economic changes such as Basel II. How the global financial architecture evolved and … Continue reading
Fed and Housing Bubble
Below is a list of articles and quotes that discuss whether the Federal Reserve Bank was responsible for the housing bubble and the subsequent subprime crisis: Eric Englund writes in April 22nd 2006 the article “The Federal Reserve and Housing: … Continue reading
The need for systemic risk
To speak about systemic risks only makes sense when analyzing a large system, such as the international financial markets. The financial markets are the quintessential traders of risk, because risks from investments, macro- and micro-economic policy, technological innovation and behaviour … Continue reading
Systemic Risk – Discussion by Alexander, Eatwell, Dhumale
In their book “Global Governance of Financial Systems” the authors try to define the various dimensions of Systemic Risk. The CMAP (click on the picture to see the full picture) outlines the main concepts that the authors introduce. Systemic risk … Continue reading
Bill Cara: Finance Ministers vs. Central Bank Governors
In commenting the G7/FSF-report, Bill Cara makes an exemplified critique in the tradition of the American Populist movement: The G-7 meetings are ‘potentially’ the most important in the world. This is the gathering of Finance/Treasury Ministers and Central Bankers of … Continue reading
G7-April-2008-Meeting and Plaza-Accord
French Finance Minister Christine Lagard has compared the recent FSF-report released by the G7 Finance Ministers last week to the Plaza Accord (as quoted by Christopher Swann in an article at Bloomington): The April 11 statement was “not very different” … Continue reading
Global Financial Governance – Definitions by Alexander, Eatwell and Dhumale
Alexander, Eatwell and Dhumale make this causal explanation for the need of Global Financial Governance (p. 14): In the post-Bretton-Woods-Era, banks and financial instutions have adopted innovative financial instruments to diversify earnings and to hedge against credit and market risk. … Continue reading
Financial stability – a public good?
When defining Financial Stability, the authors of the book on “Global Financial Governance” stated that financial stability is a “public good [which] will never be provided adequately by the market without regulatory intervention” (p. 18). In the traditional meaning, a … Continue reading