The Gold Standard  

TGS has sympathy for Tobin Tax. But, it has no sympathy for this sort of ‘regulation’. If anything, it is counterproductive and wins sympathy for financial sector free-market fundamentalists. Most reasonable people agree that the financial sector is not the same as competitive real sectors and it needs regulation, if not for any other reason, [...]

Dani Rodrik says that banks are losing support of economists in maintaining their grip on the political establishment. He bases his observations on the revision in IMF thinking (published in February 2010) on the utility of capital controls as one more weapon in the policy arsenal of sovereign governments. From here, he reckons that it [...]

It all started with this URL that  came from a colleague. It was a piece by Stratfor, an American think-tank, on the fiscal deficit problems of Greece.
I read it and my first reaction was that it was interesting to read and it made sense too. I circulated to some friends in Europe, or more precisely, [...]

Banks refuse to learn. We had Mr. Peter Sands of Standard Chartered Bank criticising most regulatory proposals including that of the proposal to separate proprietary trading, floated by Paul Volcker in the US. There were news that Royal Bank of Scotland was setting aside large sum as bonuses although UK Treasury approved the bonus pools. There [...]

I shall start with mine. You can find it here. India’s Finance Minister presented the fiscal budget for 2010-11 on Friday, February 26th. He promised a vision document. It did not quite amount to that, to put it mildly. Given what had happened in Greece and given the fact that this was no ‘election year’ [...]

First, a colleague sent me this article in Germany’s ‘Der Spiegel’. That article simply mentioned the role of Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs in helping to postpone the recognition of debt back in the days when it had not yet joined the monetary union or shortly, thereafter:

Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure [...]

The decision of the Federal Reserve Board (this is not the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee that decides on monetary policy) to increase the discount rate (it calls it the ‘primary credit rate’) by 25 basis points to 0.75% and to reduce the maximum maturity of the borrowing at the discount window to just a [...]

Chairman Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve with a vote of 70-30 in the Senate. It does not matter that, in standard democratic parlance, this was a comfortable victory. In the context of the post, 30 dissenting votes could be 30 too many. Chairman Bernanke’s speech at the [...]

Alastair Darling’s one-off bonus windfall tax seems theoretically sound, to me. People can quibble with the floor above which the tax is applicable but the principle is sound. Emanuel Derman wrote about it a while ago. I had blogged it here. He reckoned that since bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, he felt that it [...]

I have not posted in a long time. It was not meant to be this way. It just happened. Let me break the stalemate with a post on bubbles. Nothing original. It just so happens to be the topic on which I spoke in Mumbai over the weekend. The Indian Alumni Association of the Asian [...]