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Sunday, April 15

15th Apr - Weekender: Economics

Very nice events, lectures and thoughts on this week's economics special - enjoy!


CONFERENCES
The Crisis and the Regulation of the Financial SectorEconomist’s View
Speakers include Solow, Malkiel, Jarrow, Hull, Bernanke. Rethinking Market Efficiency - Rethinking Financial Innovation - Rethinking Financial Regulation - Rethinking Macroeconomics and Finance

Is INET Evolving?Economist’s View
Change won't come from the older, established economists who comprise most of the audience -- gray hair is in excess supply here -- change will come from the younger generation.

INET Conference in Berlin: Day 1 VideosEconomist’s View
Speakers include Soros, White, Fischer. Challenging the Foundations of Economic Thinking - Paradigm Lost - Which Way Forward? Reflections on Global Turmoil and the Role of Markets, Governments, and Civil Society - What Can Economists Know? Rethinking the Foundations of Economic Understanding

INET Conference in Berlin: Day 2 VideosEconomist’s View
Speakers include Stiglitz, Soros, Asmussen. What Matters: Fundamental Challenges and Self Inflicted Wounds - Reflections on the Politics of Deficit Reduction - Debt: Inflation and Austerity - Debt: The Politics and Economics of Restructuring - Is Mercantilism Doomed to Fail? - The Future of Europe

CENTRAL BANKING, FISCAL POLICY
When monetary policy needs to incorporate fiscal policyFelix Salmon / Reuters
If you look at what’s happened since the crisis of 2008, elected policymakers have generally turned to central banks and said “hey, we’re bound by all manner of real and imagined constraints, so please can you do what’s necessary in the short term, since we can’t.”… But that course of action has unintended consequences. For one thing, it makes the central bank politically unpopular. And for another, it tends to increase imbalances, including income and wealth inequalities, rather than decrease them.

The Federal Reserve's Utter Policy FailureThe Atlantic
The Federal Reserve on the other hand has a dual mandate which it is consistently and flagrantly ignoring… The Federal Reserve knows exactly what it needs to do to remedy this situation: commit to zero interest rates until nominal spending in the US economy is within 2% of its 1990- 2007 trend line.

Some Reflections on the Crisis and the Policy ResponseFED
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke at the Russell Sage Foundation and The Century Foundation Conference on "Rethinking Finance" 13-Apr

The Response to the Financial Crisis – In Charts US Treasury
These charts provide a more comprehensive update on the impact of the combined actions of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

OTHER
Convergence in US-EU labor markets Fatasmihov
Out of the many signs that the US economic recovery is not as strong as previous ones, the variable that possibly best demonstrates the weakness of the recovery is the stagnant employment to population ratio.

This Time, It Is Not DifferentDeLong
The Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics – 32-page draft by J. Bradford DeLong, U. C. Berkeley and NBER (h/t Alea)

For Capitalism to Survive, Crime Must Not Paynew deal 2.0
Unequal enforcement of the law will distort and destroy any capitalist society, and we may be witnessing just such a downward spiral in the financial sector.

A note on model risk, policy design, and political alliancesinterfluidity
But it is not the truth that we are after here. We should strive for something far less grand: to do actual good in the world…We can work together even when the stories that we tell ourselves are worlds apart.

Country Default RiskBespoke Investment Group
Countries ranked based on %-change of CDS prices (not absolute riskiness)