Tag Archives: Monetary Policy

The following appeared in Nature magazine on 17 June, 2020 Economic researchers neglect the role of financialization in global existential crises. Riddled with comorbidities, the current global monetary and financial set-up precipitates crises with increasing frequency. At first, these were on the fringes of the global economy; in 2007–09 they moved to its very core. Since 1971, national economies, and all our lives, have been shaped by this ‘system’,...

The following appeared in Nature magazine on 17 June, 2020 Economic researchers neglect the role of financialization in global existential crises. Riddled with comorbidities, the current global monetary and financial set-up precipitates crises with increasing frequency. At first, these were on the fringes of the global economy; in 2007–09 they moved to its very core. Since 1971, national economies, and all our lives, have been shaped by this ‘system’, which can be described only as...

Below are the slides from my presentation at Beyond Covid on 12th June. The whole webinar can ve viewed here.The pandemic seems to me to resemble the "nuclear disaster" scenarios of my youth: hide in the bunker, then creep out when the immediate danger is over, only to find a world that is still dangerous and has fundamentally changed in unforeseeable ways. Rabbits hiding from a hawk is perhaps a kinder image, though hawks don't usually leave devastation in their wake. And I like rabbits. So...

Below are the slides from my presentation at Beyond Covid on 12th June. The whole webinar can ve viewed here.The pandemic seems to me to resemble the "nuclear disaster" scenarios of my youth: hide in the bunker, then creep out when the immediate danger is over, only to find a world that is still dangerous and has fundamentally changed in unforeseeable ways. Rabbits hiding from a hawk is perhaps a kinder image, though hawks don't usually leave devastation in their wake. And I like rabbits. So...

The following article appeared on The Correspondent’s website on 17 April, 2020 With acknowledgement to HiltonT for the image of the President Steyn Gold Mine in Welkom, Orange Free State. I was born and grew up in a dusty, sparsely populated gold mining town on the bare and vast ‘veld’ of the Orange Free State, South Africa. As a child, my town’s dependence on the extraction of gold at a price fixed in Washington, opened my eyes to the architecture of the international...

“The Bank has always held itself bound to the extent of its power to render the assistance required by the Treasury in any exigency and under any condition of the Money Market.” – James Currie, Governor of Bank of England, July 1885 to Lord Salisbury, Prime MinisterThe new agreement between Government and Bank of England to make the Government’s overdraft with the Bank (the Ways and Means Facility) open-ended has been characterised as direct “monetary financing” of...

This post argues that the new Governor of the Bank of England is wrong to address the Bank’s role in the crisis through the prism of traditional ‘price stability targeting’. Rather, the Bank’s duty and task is to support the government’s economic (including fiscal) policies, and in particular - and in so doing - to act to protect the financial stability of the whole system. Actions to support the Bank’s monetary and financial stability objectives need to be integrated.On...

This is the first of two posts on the current crisis by Professor Massimo Amato, of Bocconi University, Milan. Well before the health emergency is over, the coronavirus crisis has already begun to produce devastating effects on the economy. This happens not only because the only accepted strategy, that of a lockdown, involves a strong slowdown in economic activity, but because the exposure of the economic system to expectations is such that the medium-term effects are so...

Excellent summary of monetary versus fiscal.  Bond Economics Yes, It's Not $1.5 Trillion Of Spending Brian Romanchuk

One of the enduring myths that mainstream macroeconomists and the politicians that rely on their lies to depoliticise their own unpopular actions continue to propagate is that of ‘central bank independence’. This is the claim that macroeconomic policy making improved in the ‘neoliberal’ era following the emergence of Monetarism because monetary policy was firmly in the hands of technocratic bankers who were not part of the political cycle. As such, they could make decisions based on...