Complementary Currencies
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008A list of resources related to local currencies, sometimes also called complementary currencies can be found here.
Archive for May, 2008
A list of resources related to local currencies, sometimes also called complementary currencies can be found here.
Africa and Local Bond Markets
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008Great article by Peter Nixon on the Development of Local Bond Markets in Africa. He outlines the following benefits from having Local Bond Markets: Foreign versus local currency Reduced volatility and easier debt management Long-term fiscal budget stability Increased investors confidence Reduced conflict of interest between devaluation of currency to spur export growth and appreciation of ...
Inflation and Consumer Spending - NY Times Graph
Sunday, May 11th, 2008The NYTimes has released an interactive graph which illustrates the spending of an average consumer and how this has changed over the last year. The graph was created by the Journalists Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox and German Computer-Visualisation-Expert Michael Balzer (Via Richard De La Madrid)
Contagion - Definition by Worldbank
Thursday, May 8th, 2008The World Bank has a fairly comprehensive overview over different definitions of contagion and documents related to recent contagious events in the financial markets. Some excerpts: Broad Definition: Contagion is the cross-country transmission of shocks or the general cross-country spillover effects. Restrictive Definition: Contagion is the transmission of shocks to other countries or ...
Contagion - Definition by Calomiris
Thursday, May 8th, 2008In his article on Global Financial Architecture, Charles Calomiris defines "Contagion": Correlations in asset returns are much higher across emerging market countries during crises than at other times, and even government bond yields move together to an unusual degree during financial crises. There are several explanations for this "contagion." One is ...
Hedge Funds and Benfords Law
Thursday, May 8th, 2008Glyn Holton wrote an article about how to detect fraud in the reports by Hedge Funds: using Benford's Law. Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger ...
Pro-Cyclicality - Discussion of the problem and possible solutions
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008How to define pro-cyclicality Procyclicality is used in the context of discussing the effects of Basel II on the financial system. A simplified definition of pro-cyclicality is: International rules have encouraged banks to act more aggressively when the economic cycle is in the middle of an upswing, when some argue that is ...
Concepts and Measurement of Risk - Article by Borio, Furfine, Lowe
Sunday, May 4th, 2008Claudio Borio, Craig Furfine and Philip Lowe discuss concepts of risks in their article "Pro-cyclicality of the financial system and financial stability: issues and policy options": They distinguish several types of risk: expected and unexpected losses (in the statistical sense) “Expected losses” refer to the average or mean losses anticipated over a particular ...
Subprime Losses
Sunday, May 4th, 2008This table summarizes the losses by banks and securities firms as a result of the subprime crisis. Source: Bloomberg. If you are faced with a question on how to rank the losses resulting of the subprime crisis (see video here, via Bayesian Heresy), you might want to have the right ...