Central banks

The Future of Money: The Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies

"Money as we know it stands at the threshold of yet another major transformation in its long and storied history," writes Eswar...

The Incoming Currency War

Four powerful forces—cryptocurrencies, the decoupling of geographical and monetary boundaries, ad-based digital platforms’ foray into the world of payments, and the value...

Central Bankers Face Potential Conflict of Interest When Writing About QE Policies

As Quantitative Easing makes a return during the global Covid-19 pandemic, its effectiveness has once again come under intense debate in both...

How Inequality Hurts the Economy and Complicates Policy Responses to the Pandemic

In the years leading up to the pandemic, rising inequality created a saving glut of the rich which pushed down interest rates...

In Chile, It Is Always the Banks That Decide the Direction of Politics

Chile's government announced it would deliver $24 billion in state-guaranteed loans through the financial system to save companies at risk of bankruptcy due to the...

Covid-19, Central Banks, and Debt Monetization: a Webinar With Olivier Blanchard

Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier and former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard discuss the impact of the current global health crisis on public finances and policy...

Is Monetary Policy Independence Out of Date? A Mini-Course With Paul Tucker (Part 3)

The Federal Reserve and the ECB have been taking unprecedented steps to react to the financial impact of Covid-19. To frame the debate around the...

Stick, Carrot, and Evergreen Loans: A Policy Proposal to Save Small and Medium-Sized Firms

Restaurant owners, retailers, and the like employ more than 50 percent of the US workforce, yet neither have cash buffers nor access to Federal Reserve support. In...

How to Interpret Financial Market Movements to Predict the Impact of Coronavirus on GDP

Equity markets in the EU and US dropped by as much as 30 percent, which means that investors have revised downward their estimate of...

How Covid-19 Infected Global Financial Markets: a Webinar

Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier and Torsten Slok, Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, discuss what happened during Wall Street's worst week since the 2008...

LATEST NEWS

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.

The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project

In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.