The Gold Standard  

I.M.F. policies call for it to disclose documents and information on a timely basis, with the deletion only of market-moving information. But under the rules a member country may decide to withhold a report, an organization official said.
China allowed the release of its reports until the monetary fund’s executive board decided in June 2007 that [...]

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati is now blogging. It is good news. Even better news is that he seems regular with his comments. They are not sporadic. With Professor Bhagwati, one cannot offer the excuse that one did not understand where he stood and what he stood for.
His latest comment is on China-bashing on exchange rate. Suffice [...]

I had deliberately labelled this part 4.  The first three parts appeared in May 2009. See here, here and here. Good friend Sushant sent me this post in ‘Foreign Policy’. It rehashes many old theories and expressions. That is why I had linked to all the three previous posts I had made on this topic. [...]

The release of the monthly TIC data by the US Treasury was cause for some hyperventilation among journalists and others. China’s holding of US Treasuries Notes and Bonds had dropped by about USD35 billion. Is China dumping the dollar? Some wondered if it had anything to do with President Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama. [...]

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 [...]

Debate on the above topic is heating up. Paul Krugman has a simple and yet scathing blog post on the topic of renmimbi undervaluation. See here. It is unlikely that he would be invited to China again. He links to this article in NYT which refers to President Obama’s comment on the Chinese currency:
to make sure [...]

Some days ago, I had posted this comment on the AIG bailout. I had indicated that the real villains were the credit-rating agencies rather than one firm or the other. We have an update from Gretchen Morgenson of NYT. That does indeed shed new light on the subject. Few things stand out from this article:
(1) [...]

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 [...]

The main problem with this story is that this does not confront the question of what would have happened to the financial system globally had Goldman Sachs been allowed to take its loses on the CDS it had bought from AIG, if all that they are trying to prove is that the AIG bailout was [...]