Archive for the ‘Discussions’ Category
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Commodity prices for agricultural products are rising - which is a troublesome sight for many least-developed and developing countries. Riots over the prices of basic food items, such as rice, wheat, corn, are threatening to destabilize many countries around the world. The development programmes of the United Nations and various ...
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Dirk Schoenmaker and Sander Osterloo from the Dutch Finance Ministry have written an article about Cross-border issues in European financial supervision as part of the book on the Structure of Financial Regulation by David G Mayes and Geoffrey E Wood.
At the beginning of their article, they point to the fundamental ...
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Charles Goodhart has written an article called "Financial supervision from an historical perspective" in a book about the "Structure of Financial Regulation" by David Mayed and Geoffrey E Wood.
He mostly focuses on the role of the Central Bank in the financial system, and in particular about how the Bank of ...
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Monday, April 21st, 2008
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 houses. Of these, around 109 million houses are occupied year-round, 75 million ...
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008
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: A Cluster of Errors?" warning about the link between interest rates ...
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
George Reisman, who is associated with the Mises Institute, has written an interesting article called "Our Financial House of Cards". As a student of Ludwig von Mises, he exemplifies the thinking of the Austrian School of Economics which is, like many libertarians, highly skeptical of government intervention in markets.
(This skepticism ...
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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 of market participants is constantly assessed and priced.
The existence of ...
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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 is defined as...
a negative externality that imposes costs on society ...
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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 historically the seven most economically powerful nations.
There is a big gap, ...
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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'' from the importance of the 1985 Plaza Accord.
The Plaza Accord reached ...
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