Tag Archives: cash

"Squirreling money under the mattress?" ?Zero HedgeHundreds Of Billions In Gold And Cash Are Quietly Disappearing Tyler Durden With the Hong Kong protests showing no sign of letting up, a new narrative has emerged; that anti-government activists are "sliding into terrorism with home-made bombs" designed to inflict mass casualties. On Sunday, Hong Kong police reported that they foiled a second bomb plot in under a week - arresting three men who were allegedly testing home-made devices and...

Ever since the secured overnight repo rate (SOFR) spiked to 10% in September, there have been dire warnings that these exceptional movements show the financial system is fundamentally broken. The story goes that the post-crisis financial system is so dysfunctional that it is unable to operate without continual injections of money from central banks. The Fed's attempt to reduce the $4.2tn of reserves it added to the financial system in three rounds of QE has dangerously destabilised the...

Ever since the secured overnight repo rate (SOFR) spiked to 10% in September, there have been dire warnings that these exceptional movements show the financial system is fundamentally broken. The story goes that the post-crisis financial system is so dysfunctional that it is unable to operate without continual injections of money from central banks. The Fed's attempt to reduce the $4.2tn of reserves it added to the financial system in three rounds of QE has dangerously destabilised the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I wasn’t going to even address the SNAP/Box of canned foods proposal in the news, but thankfully Paul Niehaus and Michael Faye of cash transfer fame did it well. As always, when it comes to international development, even cash advocates say that some conditions need to be right. See this conversation with Berk Ozler, Seema Jayachandran, and Andrew Zeitlin for some reminders – markets need to function well so people can get when...

The failure of Carillion has brought to light widespread moral hazard in the outsourcing sector. For years, companies that deliver crucial public services relied on expectation of government support to keep their borrowing costs low and enable them to please shareholders by giving dividends they couldn't afford. They, and the banks and investors that funded them, assumed they were too important to fail. So when Carillion was on the brink of failure, RBS tightened the screws, clearly...

Those excellent researchers at the House of Commons Library have produced a briefing paper on the Carillion collapse. It is clear, succinct and well-researched. And extremely grim.The researchers seem to have gone back through the reports & accounts to about 2009. And they conclude that Carillion was a basket case not just in the last year of its life, but from about 2011 onwards. I've now done the same exercise, and I agree with them. Carillion's cupboards were virtually bare, and the...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You might have heard that just giving the poor cash, no strings attached, is all the rage in the effective aid community. Some people have suggested that if organizations want to give (more expensive) in-kind aid (food, cattle), they should first show that it’s more effective than cash. Dev Patel just recirculated a relevant paper (summary here) from Cunha, De Giorgi, and Jayachandran, who tested giving cash vs. in-kind food aid...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You might have heard that just giving the poor cash, no strings attached, is all the rage in the effective aid community. Some people have suggested that if organizations want to give (more expensive) in-kind aid (food, cattle), they should first show that it’s more effective than cash. Dev Patel just recirculated a relevant paper (summary here) from Cunha, De Giorgi, and Jayachandran, who tested giving cash vs. in-kind...