Monthly Archives for May 2008
Complementary Currencies
A list of resources related to local currencies, sometimes also called complementary currencies can be found here. Topics of this post: currency, developing countries, Memo See also World Bank G24 – Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and … Continue reading
Africa and Local Bond Markets
Great 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 … Continue reading
Inflation and Consumer Spending – NY Times Graph
The 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 … Continue reading
Contagion – Definition by Worldbank
The 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 … Continue reading
Contagion – Definition by Calomiris
In 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 … Continue reading
Hedge Funds and Benfords Law
Glyn 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 … Continue reading
Concepts and Measurement of Risk – Article by Borio, Furfine, Lowe
Claudio 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) … Continue reading
Subprime Losses
This 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, … Continue reading