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Gene Ellis

Financial Crisis Far From Over, Says Outgoing Bank of England Chief - 0 views

  • He said that while the eurozone works for some countries, it was obvious that others were unable to keep up. "There is a basic question: what is the right size for a single monetary policy?" In a clear reference to Greece, Portugal and Cyprus, he said the crisis had exposed countries with weaker productivity and higher labour costs.
  • Blanchard said the powers acquired by central banks created a "democratic deficit" that could eventually lead to social unrest. The situation in Europe was a cause for concern, especially when central banks were put in a position of making crucial decisions that affected millions of people's lives, he said.
Gene Ellis

The Two Innovation Economies by William Janeway - Project Syndicate - 0 views

  • The strategic technologies that have repeatedly transformed the market economy – from railroads to the Internet – required the construction of networks whose value in use could not be known when they were first deployed.
  • Consequently, innovation at the frontier depends on funding sources that are decoupled from concern for economic value;
  • Financial speculation has been, and remains, one required source of funding. Financial bubbles emerge wherever liquid asset markets exist. Indeed, the objects of such speculation astound the imagination: tulip bulbs, gold and silver mines, real estate, the debt of new nations, corporate securities.
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  • Occasionally, the object of speculation has been one of those fundamental technologies – canals, railroads, electrification, radio, automobiles, microelectronics, computing, the Internet – for which financial speculators have mobilized capital on a scale far beyond what “rational” investors would provide. From the wreckage that has inevitably followed, a succession of new economies has emerged.
  • Complementing the role of speculation, activist states have played several roles in encouraging innovation.
  • In the United States, the government constructed transformational networks (the interstate highway system), massively subsidized their construction (the transcontinental railroads), or played the foundational role in their design and early development (the Internet).
  • For countries following an innovative leader, the path is clear. Mercantilist policies of protection and subsidy have been effective instruments of an economically active state.
  • List noted how Britain’s emergence as “the first industrial nation” at the end of the eighteenth century depended on prior state policies to promote British industry. “Had the English left everything to itself,” he wrote, “the Belgians would be still manufacturing cloth for the English, [and] England would still have been the sheepyard for the [Hanseatic League].”
  • To begin, the “national champions” of the catch-up phase must be rendered accessible to competitive assault. More generally, the state’s role must shift from executing well-defined programs to supporting trial-and-error experimentation and tolerating entrepreneurial failure. And the debilitating “corruption tax” that seems inevitably to accompany economic revolutions must be curbed, as it was in Britain during the nineteenth century and America during the twentieth.
Gene Ellis

German and French banks call the shots - European, Business - Independent.ie - 0 views

  • German and French banks call the shots Print Email  NormalLargeExtra Large ShareNew  0  0   Also in European Debt crisis: European shares edge lower and growth worries persist Bank of England's Tucker 'wasn't encouraged to lean on Barclays' Draghi keeps door open to further interest rate cuts Marks and Spencers sales hit by summer deluge Spain's debt tops 7pc danger level as Madrid gets more time European Home "Shocking" 2012 HoroscopeWhat Does 2012 Have In Store For You? Shockingly Accurate. See Free!www.PremiumAstrology.comExpat Health InsuranceQuick, Compare, Trusted Website Expatriate Health Insurance Quoteswww.ExpatFinder.com/Instant-Quoteshttp://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=BMEejVeb8T8fDKoSG_QaAhrTCB-q_1OYBmoqphxvAjbcB0NkREAMYAyDgw6kIKAU4AFD4gumFAmCpsL6AzAGgAairsfEDsgESd3d3LmluZGVwZW5kZW50LmllyAEB2gFfaHR0cDovL3d3dy5pbmRlcGVuZGVudC5pZS9idXNpbmVzcy9ldXJvcGVhbi9nZX
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  • known to itself, the ECB -- in clear contravention of both previous market precedent and financial logic -- has insisted that the senior bondholders be repaid in full and has lent the Irish banks, institutions which it must have known were hopelessly insolvent, €70bn to do so.
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  • Top of the list are German banks, to whom we owe €92bn with a further €38bn of other exposures. Does the fact that Irish banks potentially owe their counterparts up to €146bn explain the German government's implacable opposition to any write-down of the Irish banks' debts? After the British and the Germans, it is the French banks -- with total Irish bank loans of almost €32bn and a further €23bn of other exposures -- who have the biggest exposure to Ireland. Does this provide at least a partial explanation for French president Nicolas Sarkozy's truculence when faced with Irish requests that senior bondholders be forced to accept a haircut?
Gene Ellis

BBC News - Battle of the knowledge superpowers - 0 views

  • Instead of basking in the reflected glory of a prize winner funded by European grants, she said she had to listen to a speech attacking the red-tape and bureaucracy - and "generally embarrassing the hell out of me".
  • But the knowledge economy does not always scatter its seed widely. When the US is talked about as an innovation powerhouse, much of this activity is based in narrow strips on the east and west coasts. A map of Europe measuring the number of patent applications shows a similar pattern - with high concentrations in pockets of England, France, Germany and Finland.
  • Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe, explained what was profoundly different about these new digital industries - that they expand at a speed and scale that would have been impossible in the traditional manufacturing industries. Governments trying to respond to such quicksilver businesses needed to ensure that young people were well-educated, creative and adaptable, he said.
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  • There were 11 million jobs lost, half of them in the United States, and with low-skilled workers and manufacturing the hardest hit.
  • From a standing start, China now has 12% of graduates in the world's big economies - approaching the share of the UK, Germany and France put together. The incumbent superpower, the United States, still towers above with 26% of the graduates.
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Gene Ellis

Eurozone crisis: can the centre hold? | Nouriel Roubini | Business | theguardian.com - 0 views

  • Several developments helped to restore calm. The European Central Bank (ECB) president, Mario Draghi, vowed to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro, and quickly institutionalised that pledge by establishing the ECB's "outright monetary transactions" programme to buy distressed eurozone members' sovereign bonds.
  • And, even if such adjustment is not occurring as fast as Germany and other core eurozone countries would like, they remain willing to provide financing, and governments committed to adjustment are still in power.
  • For starters, potential growth is still too low in most of the periphery, given ageing populations and low productivity growth, while actual growth – even once the periphery exits the recession, in 2014 – will remain below 1% for the next few years, implying that unemployment rates will remain very high.
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  • levels of private and public debt, domestic and foreign, are still too high, and continue to rise as a share of GDP, owing to slow or negative output growth. This means that the issue of medium-term sustainability remains unresolved.
  • At the same time, the loss of competitiveness has been only partly reversed, with most of the improvement in external balances being cyclical rather than structural.
  • The euro is still too strong, severely limiting the improvement in competitiveness that is needed to boost net exports in the face of weak domestic demand.
  • a continuing credit crunch, as undercapitalised banks deleverage by selling assets and shrinking their loan portfolios.
  • The larger problem, of course, is that progress toward banking, fiscal, economic and political union, all of which are essential to the eurozone's long-term viability, has been too slow.
  • all imply that banks will have to focus on raising capital at the expense of providing the financing needed for economic growth.
  • Moreover the ECB, in contrast to the Bank of England, is unwilling to be creative in pursuing policies that would ameliorate the credit crunch.
  • Meanwhile, austerity fatigue is rising in the eurozone periphery.
  • And bailout fatigue is emerging in the eurozone's core.
  • But the eurozone's political strains may soon reach a breaking point,
Gene Ellis

Revisiting the pain in Spain | vox - 0 views

  • The fundamental reason why this was possible was the ECB’s announcement in 2012 that it would perform the role of lender of last resort in the government bond markets. This took the fear factor out of the market, and allowed yields in the Spanish (and other) government bond markets to decline without fundamentals showing much – if any – improvement.
  • This was made possible by the fact that in the UK – a stand-alone country – the adjustment mechanism included a large currency depreciation that led to a significantly higher nominal growth rate than in Spain, where currency depreciation was not possible and where intense austerity measures were imposed.
  • This in a way can be said to be the price Spain paid for being in a monetary union.
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  • The ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions programme was instrumental in reducing Spanish government bond yields. This alleviated the Spanish fiscal position, but did not make it sustainable. The continuing unsustainability of the Spanish government debt has to do with two factors: First while r (the interest rate) declined, g (nominal growth) remained much lower in Spain than in the UK. The latter was due to the deflationary forces in the Eurozone – themselves a result of excessive austerity and the absence of currency depreciation (which was made possible in the UK thanks to the expansionary monetary policies of the Bank of England).
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