Finance

These videos cover not only Dr. de Cecco’s seminal research on the international gold standard, but his views on the international monetary system between the wars, the formation of the Bretton Woods system, and its breakdown – all topics on which Dr. de Cecco has written copiously.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, yet few countries have been eager to join the festivities.

Government safety nets give protected institutions an implicit subsidy and intensify incentives for value-maximizing boards and managers to risk the ruin of their firms. Standard accounting statements do not record the value of this subsidy and forcing subsidized institutions to show more accounting capital will do little to curb their enhanced appetite for tail risk.

The New York Times is having a “Room For Debate” discussion on its Opinion Page about how corporations should handle profits based on the Harvard Business Review article “Profits Without Prosperity” by William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The discussion features contributions by Bruce Greenwald, Peter Thiel, and Lazonick, among others. Lazonick argues that the capital being used for stock buybacks would be better spent on investment. Lazonick’s “Room For Debate” piece is below. To read the full discussion on The New York Times, click here.

The flummery of capital-requirement repairs undertaken in response to the Great Financial Crisis.

As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid-1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households.

We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.

We show how every stock-flow consistent model of the macroeconomy can be represented as a directed acyclic graph.

In the past decade and a half, state and local public employee retirement systems in the United States have significantly shifted their fund investment strategies toward a greater allocation in alternative investments. Today, roughly $660 billion of public pension funds are invested in hedge funds and private equity funds. These alternative investments typically require new governance structures within the pension funds in order to adequately monitor accompanying risks and returns, management fee arrangements and investment complexity.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis initially appeared to have destroyed a huge amount of wealth in the U.S.

Ever since 2008, increasing numbers of economists, students, and even market professionals have protested the way economics is currently taught and practiced.

Readers of Minsky are familiar with the idea that governments should act as financial stabilizing agents for their economies by running surpluses in times of boom and deficits in times of crises.

The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.

India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.

The president of INET, Johnson(2013) emphasized the importance of Asian tradition for building up the New Economic Thinking. “It ismy sense that the Asian tradition of thought and philosophical perspective are better suited to embracing this radical uncertainty and living in the experimentation of the adaptive complex system that our world appears to resemble than are the Western mindsets that are the product of the Cartesian Enlightenment.” In the summary he argues that “As the Asian societies continue to evolve the architects will be better served by an new economics for Asia and from Asia that is based on the notions of radical uncertainty, complex adaptive systems, mimetic desire, the inseparability of politics and economics, and a vision of a world where policy makers are themselves less knowing and less capable of control than we often yearn to believe is within their power.”

Debate about the pension crises has centered on certain questions such as: Are greedy government workers bankrupting states? Arepension-slashing politicians backed by big money saving the day? Or do the budget problems of state and localgovernments have more to do with wasteful corporate subsidies than pensions? What are the real policy solutions to the pressures placed on pensions?”

Economists discussing the problem of radical uncertainty commonly invoke Frank Knight’s classic definition in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but only rarely venture to explore the broader contours of his argument.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.

Adair Turner at the Institute’s #HumanAfterAll conference in Toronto, CA (2014).

The fall of 2008 was scary. For most people, the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy resembled a major earthquake with strong aftershocks. Official narratives have promoted the image of the crisis as a rare, unpreventable and unforeseen natural disaster, the “100-year flood.” Policymakers emphasize the extraordinary measures they have taken to prevent the system from collapsing and to support recovery since.

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes.

We study analytically and numerically Minsky instability as a combination of top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer positive feedback loops.

Since the outbreak of the Greek debt crisis at the end of 2009, the Eurozone finds itself in an unprecedented debt crisis.

Owing to its strong dependence on exports, Germany was among the economies hit hardest by the financial crisis.

Pisani-Ferry discusses the challenges facing the creation of a common monetary union in the form that was eventually agreed in the 1990s absent a political union.

What exactly is an exchange rate?

A growth model incorporating dynamics of capital per capita, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and labor and energy productivity is described.

Recent claims, particularly in Paul Krugman’s column and blog, on the superiority of the Hicks-Modigliani version of Keynesian economics calls for a re-thinking of the issues raised in the early controversies over what Joan Robinson called “bastard Keynesianism”.

Adair Lord Turner’s powerful comments about the global economy’s addiction to private debt are continuing to reverberate around the world.

Who wields supreme power over the ECB? This column analyses the recent ruling by the German Constitutional Court that the ECB cannot act as lender of last resort. Although seemingly couched by the referral of this decision to the European Court of Justice, this is a bid for power and the return to the pre-crisis paradigm of ‘ultra posse nemo obligatur’.

A showdown has taken place within Italy’s governing coalition.

Inflation targeting insufficient: central banks and governments must manage the quantity and mix of credit created

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One interpretation speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the risks of lax fiscal policies. However, the two may interact in important and understudied ways.

Reflections of the Université Catholique de Louvain “Macroeconomics in Perspective Workshop”

India’s economic leaders are determined to rein in skyrocketing inflation, but the country’s volatile political landscape may prevent reforms from taking hold.

Fears that bank regulation or capital controls could lead to a “balkanisation” of global capital markets are overstated and should not constrain policy action to address the problems created by volatile short term capital flows and excessive credit creation, says Adair Turner, Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and former chairman of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority.

Bubbles have become a major focus of discussion in today’s financial markets. But very few people actually define what they mean when describing this financial phenomenon.

The Institute will host the Winter School on Law and Finance at Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris on January 6-9, 2014.

This research project studies the pricing and liquidity implications of sentiment and disagreement as origins of radical uncertainty in financial markets.

This research project develops a new field of anthropology: the anthropology of financialization, focusing on China and two main institutions of financialization, management consultancies and fund managers.

This resarch project examines the economic theory, policy, and international political economy of cross border finance in the run up to and in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.

This research project seeks to develop a theory of how bubbles and crashes can arise even when all agents are rational, informed, and trading in perfect markets.

This research project develops a novel framework to capture both instantaneous and dynamic contagion mechanisms arising in financial networks when balance sheet linkages across entities exist.

This research project uses statistical physics and network analysis to understand and explain the contagion and panic effects associated with crises that are unexplained in standard economic models.

This research project explores the sources of and remedies for financial instability as well as the relationship between traders’ choice of a price-setting mechanism and market structure and the relationship between market freezes and the amount of intermediation in the market.

This research project provides insights into how the lending market and resale market for asset-backed securities could have broken down during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, leading to a near-collapse of the banking sector and to a significant decline in real loan activity.

This research project proposes a large-scale simulation of how distress and growth propagate through the real economy via a network of trade credit between firms.

This research project aims to change the conventional wisdom about how global banks take and manage risks and generate ideas that are both innovative and useful to realistic thinking about policy.

This project studies a broad array of financial institutions to discover the impacts of financial regulations on functionally efficient finance, productivity growth, and income distribution.

This research project builds on theory indicating that credit flows to the real sector have systematically different effects from financial flows to asset markets.

This research project develops a model of foreign exchange markets in which agents’ expectations are explicitly modeled and evolve over time and examines how these models perform in terms of capturing the behavior observed in the experiments with human subjects.

This research project introduces heterogeneous microeconomic behavior into a demand-driven stock flow consistent model to study the links between microeconomic financial fragility and macroeconomic instability.

This research project seeks to understand the linkages between the changes in the financial economy and the behavior of households in the real economy.

This research project organizes a systematic database of policies implemented in response to crises, focusing on fiscal and monetary measures, in order to identify policy action rather than simply looking at endogenous outcome variables.

This research project analyzes the history of the concentration of bank regulatory authority within the Federal Reserve and explores the public policy issues arising from that concentration.

This research project uses reflexivity thinking to develop a theory of reflexive economic agents whose behavior is central to both the theory of innovation and to the explanation of phenomena such as bubbles, cascades, and herding that are inconsistent with DSGE/rational expectations macroeconomics.

This research project focuses on the role of the representative agent in recent macroeconomics and general equilibrium theory, with a particular emphasis on how different the situation was in the economic theorizing of the first neoclassical synthesis during the 1950s.

Does it matter if the Rational Expectations Hypothesis is unrealistic?

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account for the period 1972-2007. We find that rising (top-end) personal inequality leads to a decrease of the current account, ceteris paribus.

What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?

The main goal of the macroeconomist is to understand the sources behind business cycles and the behavior of financial markets in the modern economy.

What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?

Household indebtedness in the United States grew dramatically during the decades leading up to the financial crisis.

The Bank of England took the first step in putting the brakes on the surging property market as it scrapped the United Kingdom’s flagship initiative that encourages mortgage lending, introduced earlier this year by Treasury minster George Osborne.

Germany’s economic policies are under attack from all sides.

Adair Lord Turner, former Chairman of Great Britain’s Financial Services Authority and current Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, argued in a keynote address to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday that central banks must be equipped in future to address the dangers of excessive private sector leverage, using both pre-emptive interest rate policy and macro-prudential policy tools.

Adair Lord Turner, former Chairman of Great Britain’s Financial Services Authority and current Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, will argue in a keynote address to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday that central banks must be equipped in future to address the dangers of excessive private sector leverage, using both pre-emptive interest rate policy and macro-prudential policy tools.

The destruction of trust is not an accident.

This workshop has the dual aim to expose mathematicians to new research problems in economics and economists to new techniques and developments in mathematics.

The rescue of Cyprus was a microcosm of how the nations of Europe have failed to work together to adequately address their ongoing financial crises.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, distrust in the financial sector was widespread. Even after the mess appeared to be cleaned up, the uncertainty over whether the worst was over remained real.

Finance is built on trust. It is based on promises about tomorrow, often paper promises backed by nothing other than words on a page. When trust in those promises breaks down, so too does the financial system. That is the lesson of thousands of years of history.

The United States government openly flirting with a default on its debt is, to the financial system, like a Pope wondering out loud about the existence of God.

When Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis threatened the euro’s survival, U.S. officials called their European counterparts to express bewilderment at their inability to resolve the issue.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, few would dispute the risks of excessive borrowing. But which debts should one worry about – public or private? This column presents new research on the interplay of public and private debts since 1870 in 17 advanced economies. History demonstrates that excessive private-sector borrowing plays a greater role than fiscal profligacy in generating financial instability. However, when the credit boom collapses, the government’s capacity to alleviate the downturn is limited by the prevailing level of public debt.

Advisory Board members Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff today issued a response to recent criticism of their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.”

If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

Sadly, it is questionable whether the economy has really improved.

what would measures of systematic risk have indicated to Treasury Secretary Paulsen if they had been available at that time?

How can we contain institutional failure?

A look at the large role the trade deficit of the United States has played since the 1980s.

The failure of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 marked the beginning of the end of the world’s love affair with financialization.

What can emerging economies learn from the financial meltdown in advanced economies?

With the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, a crisis in part driven by derivatives on subprime mortgages, a seemingly obscure sector of the financial market help fuel the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

what have we learned from the crisis and what should we have learned?

Simon Johnson, Professor at MIT and former chief economist of the IMF, calls for much higher capital requirements for big banks.

How could reputable ratings agencies – and investment banks – misjudge things so badly?