Also appeared in The Globalist

Written post Asia crisis but eternally applicable - he was focusing on capital flows when it still was heterodoxy -- Once upon a time, economists saw capital account liberalization--the free and unrestricted flow of capital in and out of countries--as unambiguously good. Good for debtor states, good for the world economy. No longer. Spectacular banking and currency crises in recent decades have shattered the consensus. In this remarkably clear and pithy volume, one of Europe's leading economists examines these crises, the reforms being undertaken to prevent them, and how global financial institutions might be restructured to this end. Jean Tirole first analyzes the current views on the crises and on the reform of the international financial architecture. Reform proposals often treat the symptoms rather than the fundamentals, he argues, and sometimes fail to reconcile the objectives of setting effective financing conditions while ensuring that a country "owns" its reform program. A proper identification of market failures is essential to reformulating the mission of an institution such as the IMF, he emphasizes. Next he adapts the basic principles of corporate governance, liquidity provision, and risk management of corporations to the particulars of country borrowing. Building on a "dual- and common-agency perspective," he revisits commonly advocated policies and considers how multilateral organizations can help debtor countries reap enhanced benefits while liberalizing their capital accounts.

Based on the Paolo Baffi Lecture the author delivered at the Bank of Italy, this refreshingly accessible book is teeming with rich insights that researchers, policymakers, and students at all levels will find indispensable. -- downloaded excerpt to Tab S2

https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/07/22/stitching-together-the-global-financial-safety-net/ - Very useful sketch of the various mechanisms, especially central bank swaps, that were put in place during the early part of the financial crisis that kept liquidity shocks from turning into a global crash - additional mechanism designed since then, with lots of attention on regional arrangements, and a boost to the IMF's capital. Still concerns re holes in the safety net - especially if there's contagion that's region-wide - and concerns that developing economies may not have access to sufficient resources to manage sudden stops. .

Today we are fortunate to present a guest contribution written by Marcos Chamon, Senior Economist in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund,… Surprise, surprise!

FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, September 2015, Vol. 52, No. 3 -- After a decade of social and economic progress, Latin America is facing challenging issues -- downloaded pdf to Note

Austan D. Goolsbee and Alan B. Krueger - A Retrospective Look at Rescuing and Restructuring General Motors and Chrysler (pp. 3-24) **--** W. Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Joseph Tracy and James Vickery - The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (pp. 25-52) **--** Charles W. Calomiris and Urooj Khan - An Assessment of TARP Assistance to Financial Institutions (pp. 53-80) **--** Robert McDonald and Anna Paulson - AIG in Hindsight (pp. 81-106) **--** Phillip Swagel - Legal, Political, and Institutional Constraints on the Financial Crisis Policy Response (pp. 107-22) -- available online, didn't download

Greece’s crisis has invited comparisons to the 1953 London Debt Agreement, which ended a long period of German default on external debt. This column suggests that looking back, the 1953 agreement was unnecessarily generous given that Germany’s rapid growth lightened the debt repayment burden. Unfortunately for Greece, the motivations driving the 1953 agreement are nearly entirely absent today. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Grexit should have been on the menu as a realistic option, properly supported with financing the transition, instead of the horrifying unknown for Greece and the Eurozone. Better start planning, since it's likely to come up again, certainly for Greece and possibly other EZ members.

La crise de la zone euro a révélé les faiblesses constitutives de la monnaie unique ; mais les débats portant sur sa viabilité se limitent trop souvent à une vision purement économique de la zone euro. L’histoire complexe de la création de l’euro éclaire les enjeux financiers et politiques internationaux de l’unification monétaire. -- in many ways it's the same-old, same-old -- a group of countries with intense economic interaction that gets whip-sawed by exchange rates in a constantly evolving world that's increasingly globalized, especially capital movements -- under a series of arrangements from Bretton Woods onwards, they've been trying to manage or mitigate the problem, but they never solve it -- he repeatedly notes that the entire EC budget isn't more than 1% of the aggregate GNP of the member states -- useful aide-mémoire for each step in the evolution of the EU and European money arrangements paralled with each modification of the international monetary system -- though he notes repeatedly that finance is extremely mobile, not only within the Eurozone or within the EU but globally, and that labor and fiscal adjustments are extremely immobile within the Eurozone by comparison, he doesn't draw the obvious link of these severe mismatches to the repeated problems the EU has faced re money -- downloaded pdf to Note

Highlighting his work with Rogoff as well as on exchange rate crises

Downloaded pdf to Note

Rey, Hélène, 2013, “Dilemma Not Trilemma: The Global Financial Cycle and Monetary Policy Independence” (Kansas City, Missouri: Federal Reserve Bank). -- downloaded pdf to Note

It is a commonplace among Anglo-Saxon economists that Saxon-Saxon “ordoliberalism” was a post-World War II success only because somebody else–the United… DeLong remarks on his link to the article on why the European Crisis was inevitable given German economic theory -- that the German economists have attributed the country's economic success to ordoliberalism and German virtue when it was based on an incredibly favorable environment and policy postures by the US as global hegemon. Instapaper

About a month ago, I started a series of posts about monetary policy in the 1920s, (about the Bank of France, Benjamin Strong, the difference between a… -- excellent post that gives helpful explanation of what and why the Vanque de France was doing vacuuming up the world's gold supply, and how Friedman’s reading office the memoirs of the head of the Banque de France was so distorted by his worldview that he totally missed what was said and, in the intro to the English translation, totally misrepresented or whizzed by the critical bits in the memoirs, which are quite clear on what the Banque de France was doing, which totally explodes Friedman’s interpretation of the world-wide Great Depression as the fault of the Fed to "follow the gold standard rules" -- though Friedman acknowledges that in re-reading the memoirs in translation he finds that the French shared some of the blame, (1) he misses that France's inporting of gold was an order of magnitude greater than the US, and (2) totally misunderstands the operation of the gold exchange standard. He's ssuming a vulgar version of the price-specie flow mechanism of under and over-valued, as measured solely by the US bilateral trade with the UK rather than price levels relative to the global gold price, (3) assumes that domestic prices were being adjusted by domestic monetary policy, whereas it was prices relative to the international price of gold, rather than the domestic quantity of money, that was doing the work -- so the global increase in gold price engineered primarily by the "insane Banque de France" (with the US Fed as only a minor accomplice) had globally catastrophic deflationary effects.

In making yet further revisions to our paper on Hawtrey and Cassel, Ron Batchelder and I keep finding interesting new material that sheds new light on the…

Greek crisis exposes cracks in the euro’s design that won’t be fixed by Greece leaving. Despite the euro’s legal status as an irrevocable currency union, the… Nice review of the tangle of economic, political and legal issues -- Default isn't by itself enough to force Grexit, so it's really what political stance the ECB takes, and even with Grexit there are the other members of the Eurozone suffering from similar problems as Greece -- Whelan: In recent years, the single most important factor that has papered over the cracks in the euro has been Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” commitment to preserve the euro. But if whatever-it-takes doesn’t prevent a Greek exit, there would be serious questions about what kind of euro the ECB was actually willing to bother preserving. Worth remembering is that what Draghi actually said was: "Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough." The “within our mandate” bit has provided Draghi with plenty of wiggle room to decide what kind of euro he wants to preserve. It clearly doesn’t have to be one that includes Greece. And there may be others that get jettisoned. Whether this kind of a la carte euro will survive the test of time is highly questionable.

Editor’s Note: In the book “Building a Latin American Reserve Fund: 35 years of FLAR” eminent experts from the region and around the world in the academic,…

downloaded pdf to iPhone - the post has full text but without the references in the pdf -- In the second half of 1953, the United States, for the first time, risked exceeding the statutory limit on Treasury debt. How did Congress, the White House, and Treasury officials deal with the looming crisis? As related in this post, they responded by deferring and reducing expenditures, by monetizing “free” gold that remained from the devaluation of the dollar in 1934, and ultimately by raising the debt ceiling.

The Network for Sustainable Financial Markets is an International, non-partisan network of finance sector professionals, academics and others who have an active interest in long-term investing. We believe that the recurring crises recently experienced in our financial markets are not isolated incidents. Rather, this instability is evidence that the financial market system is in need of well thought-out reform so that it can better serve its core purpose of creating long-term sustainable value. Our primary concern today is not that reform efforts will result in the adoption of too much or too little regulation. Rather, we see the greatest peril as inappropriate regulation and governance reforms that fail to address the real causes of financial market instability. While increased transparency, better risk management, additional liquidity and other surface fixes might address the current symptoms, they are not enough to resolve underlying systemic problems. Delay will only make things worse since failure to deal with these deep-rooted design flaws can only mean repetitive, deepening crises with growing economic and social destabilisation. The time to act is now. The Network’s goal is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration on research and advocacy projects between market professionals, academics and other opinion-leaders. We seek to fill the gaps between existing initiatives, to engage on problems which have received attention but have not still been solved and also to involve many more opinion-shapers than has previously been the case. We also intend that the Network be time-limited – our ultimate goal is to embed the Network’s guiding principles into the approaches used by other entities involved in research and public policy, then dissolve. -- connected to Climate Bond Initiative

Taylor argues that the ideas of J.M. Keynes and others provide a more useful framework both for understanding the crisis and for dealing with it effectively. Keynes’s basic points were fundamental uncertainty and the absence of Say’s Law. He set up machinery to analyze the macro economy under such circumstances, including the principle of effective demand, liquidity preference, different rules for determining commodity and asset prices, distinct behavioral patterns of different collective actors, and the importance of thinking in terms of complete macro accounting schemes. Economists working in this tradition also worked out growth and cycle models. Employing these ideas throughout Maynard’s Revenge, Taylor provides an analytical narrative about the causes of the crisis, and suggestions for dealing with it. 1. Macroeconomics. 2. Macroeconomic Thought during the Long 19thC. 3. Gold Standard, Reparations, Mania, Crash, and Depression. 4. Maynard Ascendant. 5. Keynesian Growth, Cycles, and Crisis. 6. The Counterrevolution. 7. Finance. 8. The International Dimension. 9. Keynesianism and the

The CEPR Press eBook on secular stagnation has been viewed over 80,000 times since it was published on 15 August 2014. -- Six years after the Crisis and the recovery is still anaemic despite years of zero interest rates. Is ‘secular stagnation’ to blame? Introduction - Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin **--** I. Opening the debate -- 1. Reflections on the ‘New Secular Stagnation Hypothesis’, Laurence H Summers. **--** II. Three issues: Potential growth, effective demand, and sclerosis -- 2. Secular stagnation: A review of the issues, Barry Eichengreen -- 3. The turtle’s progress: Secular stagnation meets the headwinds, Robert J Gordon -- 4 Four observations on secular stagnation, Paul Krugman. -- 5. Secular joblessness, Edward L Glaeser. **--** III. Further on potential growth. -- 6. Secular stagnation? Not in your life - Joel Mokyr. -- 7 Secular stagnation: US hypochondria, European disease?, Nicholas Crafts. **--** IV. Further on effective demand. -- 8. A prolonged period of low real interest rates?, Olivier Blanchard, Davide Furceri and Andrea Pescatori. -- 9. On the role of safe asset shortages in secular stagnation, Ricardo J Caballero and Emmanuel Farhi. -- 10. A model of secular stagnation, Gauti B. Eggertsson and Neil Mehrotra. -- 11. Balance sheet recession is the reason for secular stagnation, Richard C Koo. -- 12. Monetary policy cannot solve secular stagnation alone
Guntram B Wolff. **--** V. Further on sclerosis -- 13. Secular stagnation: A view from the Eurozone, Juan F. Jimeno, Frank Smets and Jonathan Yiangou -- downloaded pdf to Note

Katharina Pistor, a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, professor at Columbia University Law School, and the director of Columbia’s Center on Global Legal Transformation, is developing a Legal Theory of Finance.
In this interview, Pistor focuses in particular on the paradoxical relationship between law and finance. On the one hand, finance needs law to provide credibility. After all, financial assets are contracts, the value of which depends on their legal validation. But on the other hand, changing conditions in the financial world over time necessitate flexibility in law. An overly rigid legal system can render regulation irrelevant if financial innovation ultimately surpasses laws designed for another era. In a worst-case scenario, legal rigidity also can play a role in causing a financial accident. In the United States, the Dodd-Frank legislation represents one response to this challenge. In Europe, the melding of finance and the law is even more complex because policy makers, regulators, and legislators are dealing with 17 different nations, all of which operate with a common currency but in a series of different national jurisdictions with vastly different legal traditions and precedents.
The tension in Europe has become particularly acute in relation to some of the unconventional measures undertaken by the European Central Bank in response to the existential threat to the euro itself - have come under challenge in Germany’s Constitutional Court. Can a national constitutional court effectively invalidate an entire program undertaken by a supranational central bank, which ostensibly is responsible for a common monetary policy? This is one of the issues that Professor Pistor discusses in the exchange below.

CIn the aftermath of the global financial crisis new patterns of reserve hoarding have emerged. This column identifies structural changes in international reserve accumulation. Emerging markets with higher savings rates tend to use higher buffers of reserves, partially accounting for the higher levels of reserves in east Asia compared to Latin America. While there is no end in sight for reserve hoarding, some of the newly identified factors may mitigate eventual reserve accumulation.

Downloaded pdf to Note

American University - Washington College of Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/11 **--** The debate about currency misalignments (CMs) and trade is not new. It was already being discussed in the 1940s. What is new is that the existing mechanisms to deal with CMs at the IMF, under its Article IV, and at the WTO, under its Article XV, have proven to be ineffective. This article seeks to show the problems with these mechanisms, understand the reasons of why so, explore available options to resolve them and suggest a path to a lasting sustainable solution. - downloaded pdf to Note

Institute of International Economic Law, Georgetown University Law Center -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) - Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/10. *&--** As countries seek to promote growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis, currency intervention has become more prevalent and distortions in exchange rates with their resulting imbalances in trade flows have prompted call for new initiatives to address them, including in the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Both economic and legal experts have brought new insight into the impact of currency intervention on trade and a fresh legal perspective on the application of the rules in the WTO against measures that frustrate the intent of the GATT/WTO agreements. This paper reviews the underlying legal and policy issues and provides possible language for inclusion in the TPP or TTIP, and eventually in the WTO, that would build on the existing disciplines in the WTO and IMF agreements by authorizing remedial action in the form of safeguard and countervailing duties in response to a finding of actionable currency intervention. -- Number of Pages: 10 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Vera Thorstensen - São Paulo School of Economics (EESP) at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) -- Emerson Fernandes Marçal - Sao Paulo School of Economics - FGV; Mackenzie Presbyterian University -- Lucas Ferraz - Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV. -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/09. *--* The negotiations of mega agreements between the US and the Pacific countries (TPP) and between the US and the EU (TTIP) are raising the attention of experts on international trade law and economics. TPP and TTIP are proclaimed to be the designers of the rules for the XXI Century. Old trade instruments such as tariffs are said to be no more important for TTIP because tariffs are negligible among those partners but significant to for TPP. Another relevant agreement in negotiation is between the EU and Mercosul, where tariffs are the most important issue in discussion. The main purpose of this paper is to shows that tariff are important for all these agreements, not because of its nominal value, but because the impacts of exchange rate misalignments on tariffs are so significant that all concessions can be distorted by overvalued and by devaluated currencies. The article is divided into six sections: the first gives an introduction to the issue; the second explains the methodologies used to determine exchange rate misalignments and also presents some results for Brazil, US and China; the third summarizes the methodology applied to calculate the impacts of exchange rate misalignments on the level of tariff protection through an exercise of “misalignment tariffication” and examines the effects of exchange rate variations on tariffs and their consequences for the multilateral trading system; the fourth creates a methodology to estimate exchange rates against a basket of currencies (a virtual currency of the World) and a proposal to deal with persistent and significant misalignments related to trade rules. The fifth presents some estimates for the main PTAs. The conclusions are present in the last section. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Given the current economic climate, in particular the focus on the European Central Banks Comprehensive Assessment and the move to the Single Supervisory Mechanism, a working group from the PwC Response to the economic crisis in Europe (REcCE) network has developed a provocative point of view paper on the future shape and nature of banking services and of “banks” themselves. Future shape of banking outlines four key areas banks need to address in order to remain relevant, as we argue that the future of banking will look very different to what we see today and that while the need for banking services remains – traditional banks need to sharpen their strategic focus and regulators and regulation will also need to adapt.... adding up to a paradigm shift in the banking landscape. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Nice breakdown of theorists of causes of development and underdevelopment and problems of trying to catch up -- So if you believe most heterodox economists institutions are relevant, but not primarily those associated to the supply side; the ones linked to the demand side, in Keynesian fashion are more important than the mainstream admits. Poor countries that arrive late to the process of capitalist development cannot expand demand without limits since the imports of intermediary and capital goods cause recurrent balance of payments crises. The institutions that allow for the expansion of demand, including those that allow for higher wages to expand consumption and to avoid the external constraints, are and have been central to growth and development. The role of the State in creating and promoting the expansion of domestic markets, in the funding of research and development, and in reducing the barriers to balance of payments constraints, both by guarantying access to external markets (sometimes militarily, like in the Opium Wars) and reducing foreign access to domestic ones was crucial in the process of capitalist development. In this view, for example, what China did not have that England did, was not lack of secure property rights and the rule of law, but a rising bourgeoisie (capitalists) that had to compete to provide for a growing domestic market that had acquired a new taste (and hence explained expanding demand) for a set of new goods, like cotton goods from India, or china (porcelain) from… well China, as emphasized by economic historian Maxine Berg among others (for the role of consumption in the Industrial Revolution go here). Or simply put, China did not have a capitalist mode of production (for the concept of mode of production and capitalism go here). Again, I argued that Robert Allen’s view according to which high wages and cheap energy forced British producers to innovate to save labor, leading to technological innovation and growth, and the absence of those conditions in China led to stagnation is limited since it presupposes that firms adopt more productive technologies even without growing demand. -- see links

Books discussed - Richard Duncan, The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures *--* Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence *--* Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times *--* Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing *--*--*--* All three authors are heterodox from view of what passes for informed discourse about economic theory or political economy - by the conclusion of the essay, Giovanni Arrighi's longue-durée of transitions of a succession of capitalist empires becomes the vantage point for discussions of how we got to the Great Recession as well as where we have to start thinking about another way of understanding the geopolitical dynamics of global capitalism (or the global capitalist dynamics of geopolitics) Other TAGGED AUTHORS - Jill Ciment, Paul Krugman, Fernand Braudel, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, T.S. Eliot *--* Other TAGGED BOOKS - Reinhardt and Rogoff, This Time It's Different, *--* Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

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A Review of: Susan Strange. Casino Capitalism. Oxford and New York, NY: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 1883-1885, Book Reviews, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXV, Dec. 1987. -- Recommended Citation. - Minsky, Hyman P. Ph.D., "Review of "Casino Capitalism"" (1987). Hyman P. Minsky Archive. Paper 158. - http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/158 -- downloaded pdf to Note