Archive for the ‘Discussions’ Category
Monday, August 25th, 2008
Why Karl Rove should call himself a libertarian is a mystery, given that the Bush Administration, which he served as a central adviser to, has greatly expanded, not reduced, the goverment impact on American citizens. In Art Diamonds Blog, another example is given for Mr. Rove's hypocricy: Rove criticizes McCain ...
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Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Matthew Syed, a former British Table-Tennis Player, has written a wonderfully amusing article called "Sex and the Olympic City" about the sex life in the Athletes' Village during the Olympic Games.
He makes two interesting observations, probably suspected by the casual onlooker, but in its sincerity most fascinating: first of all, ...
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Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
This article discusses the membership of 43 key economies in the major international financial institutions. The aim is to assess whether the global financial architecture adequately incorporates the key economies. The article can also be found in this PDF-Document.
The chart (left) lists 21 international organizations. Some of them are grouped ...
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Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
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 confidence
Reduced conflict of interest between devaluation of currency to spur export growth and appreciation of ...
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Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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 Computer-Visualisation-Expert Michael Balzer (Via Richard De La Madrid)
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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 financial crises. There are several explanations for this "contagion."
One is ...
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
How 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 ...
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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)
“Expected losses” refer to the average or mean losses anticipated over a particular ...
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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, via Bayesian Heresy), you might want to have the right ...
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Charles Calomiris article on a New Global Financial Architecture from October 1998 is an interesting document, outlining the criticism of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs).
He starts with an interesting claim:
Economics normally provides rather dismal news, emphasizing tradeoffs among objectives and hard choices. In the case of redesigning the global financial ...
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