Have you ever wondered why we can afford to buy far more clothes than our grandparents ever could . . . but may be less likely to own a home in which to keep them all? Why your petrol bill can double in a matter of months, but it never falls as fast?; Behind all of this lies economics.; It's not always easy to grasp the complex forces that are shaping our lives. But by following a dollar on its journey around the globe, we can start to piece it all together.; The dollar is the lifeblood of globalisation. Greenbacks, singles, bucks or dead presidents: call them what you will, they are keeping the global economy going. Half of the notes in circulation are actually outside of the USA - and many of the world's dollars are owned by China.; But what is really happening as our cash moves around the world every day, and how does it affect our lives? By following $1 from a shopping trip in suburban Texas, via China's central bank, Nigerian railroads, the oilfields of Iraq and beyond, The Almighty Dollar reveals the economic truths behind what we see on the news every day. Why is China the world's biggest manufacturer - and the USA its biggest customer? Is free trade really a good thing? Why would a nation build a bridge on the other side of the planet?; In this illuminating read, economist Dharshini David lays bare these complex relationships to get to the heart of how our new globalised world works, showing who really holds the power, and what that means for us all.

Originally published in 1939, this book presents a study of the history and method of operation of the Exchange Equalisation Account. Avoiding an exhaustive approach, the text selects principal phases and events in the development of the Account, using them to illustrate 'the evolutionary character of the mechanism employed'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Exchange Equalisation Account, British history and economics.

This study of the Visigothic kingdom's monetary system in southern Gaul and Hispania from the fifth century through the Muslim invasion of Spain fills a major gap in the scholarship of late antiquity. Examining all aspects of the making of currency, it sets minting in relation to questions of state, monarchical power, administration and apparatus, motives for money production, and economy. In the context of the later Roman Empire and its successor states in the West, the minting and currency of the Visigoths reveal shared patterns as well as originality. The analysis brings both economic life and the needs of the state into sharper focus, with significant implications for the study of an essential element in daily life and government. This study combines an appreciation for the surprising level of sophistication in the Visigothic minting system with an accessible approach to a subject which can seem complex and abstruse.

Why are small and culturally homogeneous nation-states in the advanced capitalist world so prosperous? Examining how Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland managed the 2008 financial crisis, The Paradox of Vulnerability shows that this is not an accident. John Campbell and John Hall argue that a prolonged sense of vulnerability within both the state and the nation encourages the development of institutions that enable decision makers to act together quickly in order to survive, especially during a crisis. Blending insights from studies of comparative political economy and nationalism and drawing on both extensive interviews and secondary data, Campbell and Hall support their claim by focusing on the three states historically and, more important, in their different responses to the 2008 crisis. The authors also devote attention to the difficulties faced by Greece and Iceland. The implications of their argument are profound. First, they show that there is a positive side to nationalism: social solidarity can enhance national prosperity. Second, because globalization now requires all states to become more adaptable, there are lessons here for other states, large and small. Lastly, the formula for prosperity presented here is under threat: highly homogeneous societies face challenges in dealing with immigration, with some responding in ways that threaten their success. The Paradox of Vulnerability demonstrates how the size and culture of a nation contribute in significant ways to its ability to handle political and economic pressures and challenges.

The Roman monetary system was highly complex. It involved official Roman coins in both silver and bronze, which some provinces produced while others imported them from mints in Rome and elsewhere, as well as, in the East, a range of civic coinages. This is a comprehensive study of the workings of the system in the Eastern provinces from the Augustan period to the third century AD, when the Roman Empire suffered a monetary and economic crisis. The Eastern provinces exemplify the full complexity of the system, but comparisons are made with evidence from the Western provinces as well as with appropriate case studies from other historical times and places. The book will be essential for all Roman historians and numismatists and of interest to a broader range of historians of economics and finance.

This book introduces the fundamental monetary law problems of cross-border economic activity and the solutions thereto in international monetary law, and in EU law. After decades of having been neglected by legal scholars, international and European monetary law has attracted increasing attention in recent years. With the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), a full-fledged monetary union between sovereign States has been established for the first time in history. Its construction is primarily a work of law, with the Treaties on European Union (TEU) and on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) together with a number of protocols forming the constitutional basis. Yet, European monetary Integration has never taken place in isolation from international developments. Moreover, international monetary law, namely the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has always played a role - initially as the external monetary addition to the internal market project, after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System in the 1970s as one of the major driving forces for monetary Integration within the EU. On a fundamental basis, international and European monetary law address the same principled problems of monetary cooperation: how to proceed with financial transactions cross-border where no global currency exists. The present work describes the different approaches and relations and interplay between the two legal regimes.

The present global monetary regime is based on floating among the major advanced countries. A key underlying factor behind the present regime is credibility to maintain stable monetary policies. The origin of credibility in monetary regimes goes back to the pre-1914 classical gold standard. In that regime, adherence by central banks to the rule of convertibility of national currencies in terms of a fixed weight of gold provided a nominal anchor to the price level. Between 1914 and the present several monetary regimes gradually moved away from gold, with varying success in maintaining price stability and credibility. In this book, the editors present ten studies combining historical narrative with econometrics that analyze the role of credibility in four monetary regimes, from the gold standard to the present managed float.

Since publication of Hetzel's The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the intellectual consensus that had characterized macroeconomics has disappeared. That consensus emphasized efficient markets, rational expectations and the efficacy of the price system in assuring macroeconomic stability. The 2008-9 recession not only destroyed the professional consensus about the kinds of models required to understand cyclical fluctuations but also revived the credit-cycle or asset-bubble explanations of recession that dominated thinking in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. These 'market-disorder' views emphasize excessive risk taking in financial markets and the need for government regulation. The present book argues for the alternative 'monetary-disorder' view of recessions. A review of cyclical instability over the last two centuries places the 2008-9 recession in the monetary-disorder tradition, which focuses on the monetary instability created by central banks rather than on a boom-bust cycle in financial markets.

Attempts to assess whether the United States is in economic decline. Appropriate to general readers as well as economics students and scholars, this book examines the fears of Americans about their economic future.

How silver influenced two hundred years of world history, and why it matters today This is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the nineteenth century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. Silver has been the preferred shelter against government defaults, political instability, and inflation for most people in the world because it is cheaper than gold. The white metal has been the place to hide when conventional investments sour, but it has also seduced sophisticated investors throughout the ages like a siren. This book explains how powerful figures, up to and including Warren Buffett, have come under silver's thrall, and how its history guides economic and political decisions in the twenty-first century.

The financial crisis of 2007-10 has presented a number of key policy challenges for those concerned with the long-term stability of the euro area. It has shown that price stability as provided by the European Central Bank is not enough to guarantee financial stability, and exposed fault lines in governance and deficiencies in the architecture of the financial supervisory and regulatory framework. This book addresses these and other issues, including why the crisis affected some countries more than others, whether the euro is still attractive for new EU states, and what policy changes and structural reforms, both macro and micro, should be undertaken to ensure its future viability. Written by a team of leading academic and central bank economists, the book also includes chapters on the cross-country incidence of the crisis, the Irish crisis and ECB monetary policy during the crisis, and studies on Spain, the Baltics, Slovakia and Slovenia.

We Are Better Than This fundamentally reframes budget debates in the United States. Author Edward D. Kleinbard explains how the public's preoccupation with tax policy alone has obscured any understanding of government's ability to complement the private sector through investment and insurance programs that enhance the general welfare and prosperity of our society at large. He argues that when we choose how government should spend and tax, we open a window into our "fiscal soul," because those choices are the means by which we express the values we cherish and the regard in which we hold our fellow citizens. Though these values are being diminished by short-sighted decisions to starve government, strategic government spending can directly make citizens happier, healthier, and even wealthier. Expertly combining the latest economic research with his insider knowledge of the budget process into a simple yet compelling narrative, he unmasks the tax mythologies and false arguments that too often dominate contemporary discourse about budget policies. Large quantities of comparative data are succinctly distilled to situate the United States among its peer countries, so that readers can judge for themselves whether contemporary budget choices really reflect our aspirational fiscal soul. Kleinbard's presentation takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on economics, finance, law, political science and moral philosophy. He uniquely weaves economic research and moral philosophy together by emphasizing our welfare, not just our national income, and by contrasting the actual beliefs of Adam Smith, a great moral philosopher, with the cartoon version of the man presented by proponents of the most extreme forms of private market triumphalism.

Thoroughly updated and expanded with a new chapter on blockchain and increased coverage of cryptocurrency, as well as new data, this established advanced undergraduate textbook approaches the subject via first principles. It builds on a simple, clear monetary model and applies this framework consistently to a variety of monetary questions. Starting with trade being mutually beneficial, the authors demonstrate that money makes people better off, and that government money competes against other means of payments, including other types of government payments. After developing each of these topics, the book tackles the issue of money competing against other stores of value, examining issues associated with trade, finance, and modern banking. From simple economies to modern economies, the authors address the role banks play in making more trade possible, concluding with the information problems plaguing modern banking.

Why are financial prices so much more crisis-prone and unstable than real economy prices? Because they are doing different things. Unlike real economy prices, rooted in the real goods and services produced and exchanged, financial prices attempt to value future income flows from financial and capital assets. These valuations fluctuate erratically because expectations of the future fluctuate - and large liquid financial markets can amplify, rather than correct, these effects. The book builds on the insights of economists Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, that uncertainty of the future is essential to understand the processes of economic production and capital investment, and adds to this Karl Popper's general explanation of how expectations of an uncertain future are formed and tested through a trial and error process. Rather than relying on fluctuating financial prices to provide a guide to an uncertain future, it suggests a better approach would be to adopt the methods common to other branches of science, and create testable (falsifiable) theories allowing reasonable predictions to be made. In finance, the elements of one such theory could be based on the concept of forecasting yield from capital assets, which is a measurable phenomenon tending towards aggregate and long-term stability, and where there is a plentiful supply of historic data. By methods like this, financial economics could become a branch of science like any other. To buttress this approach, the widely accepted public policy objective of promoting real economy price stability could be widened to include financial price stability.

Financial capital, whether mediated through the financial market or Foreign Direct Investment has been a key factor in European economic growth. This book examines the interaction between European and global financial integration and analyses the dynamics of the monetary sector and the real economy in Europe. The key analytical focus is on the theoretical and empirical dynamics of financial markets in Europe, however, it also provides regional case studies of key institutional developments and lessons from foreign direct investment. There is a broad range of findings for Central, Eastern and Western Europe as well as EU Partner Countries. Crucially the analysis includes new approaches and options for solving the transatlantic banking crisis and suggests policy innovations for a world with unstable financial markets.

'The Brussels Commission has just suspended its senior economist, Bernard Connolly, for writing a book savaging the prospects for a common currency. There are many who now believe he should be lauded as a prophet.' Observer, Editorial, 1 October 1995 'Mr. Connolly's longstanding proposition that the foisting of a common currency upon so many disparate nations would end in ruin is getting a much wider hearing...' New York Times, 17 November 2011 When first published in 1995, The Rotten Heart of Europe caused outrage and delight - here was a Brussels insider, a senior EU economist, daring to talk openly about the likely pitfalls of European monetary union. Bernard Connolly lost his job at the Commission, but his book was greeted as a profound and persuasive expose of the would-be 'monetary masters of the world.' His brave act of defiance became headline news - and his book a major international bestseller. In a substantial new introduction, Connolly returns to his prophetic account of the double-talk surrounding the efforts of politicians, bankers and bureaucrats to force Europe into a crippling monetary straitjacket. Hidden agendas are laid bare, skulduggery exposed and economic fallacies are skewered, producing a horrifying conclusion. No one who wants to understand the workings of the EU, past, present and future can afford to miss this enthralling and deeply disturbing book.

This volume demonstrates how monetary and financial organizations in the United States and abroad can be improved through a new addition to traditional monetary policy. Cooperation theory, a system developed from games theory, is shown to provide an appropriate action/reaction approach that can lead to cooperation without abandoning the free market. Institutional, theoretical, and empirical results of game theory, computer simulation, monetary theory, and policy analysis are woven together so that each reinforces the other. The text clearly stresses that although unilateral, noncooperative action may result in short-term advantage for an organization, it ultimately leads to long-term losses for all in the economic system.

"Monetary Reform and Cooperation Theory" opens with a discussion of cooperation theory. It goes on to address improving the monetary financial organization. Bureaucracy and philosophy are analyzed, along with reform in the banking industry and banking in other countries. The book concludes with issues of international creditors and debtors. This work is full of useful information for the general economist, political scientist, and layman on the complex issue of monetary reform and the positive role cooperation theory can play in this vital process.

The book examines the role that the private sector can play in reducing poverty and marginality in Ethiopia by providing improved agricultural inputs to marginalized poor farmers. By creating a marginality map the author analyzes who and where the marginalized poor are. Data from a household survey about purchasing behavior, demand and needs indicates that this group can be a promising market segment for the private sector if adequate business models are applied. Yet, an analysis of the institutions governing agricultural input markets shows that investments by the private sector are discouraged by de facto monopolies of the government on crucial elements of the different supply chains, including seed breeding, fertilizer imports and finance.

The US economy today is confronted with the prospect of extended stagnation. This book explores why. Thomas I. Palley argues that the Great Recession and destruction of shared prosperity is due to flawed economic policy over the past thirty years. One flaw was the growth model adopted after 1980 that relied on debt and asset price inflation to fuel growth instead of wages. A second flaw was the model of globalization that created an economic gash. Third, financial deregulation and the house price bubble kept the economy going by making ever more credit available. As the economy cannibalized itself by undercutting income distribution and accumulating debt, it needed larger speculative bubbles to grow. That process ended when the housing bubble burst. The earlier post-World War II economic model based on rising middle-class incomes has been dismantled, while the new neoliberal model has imploded. Absent a change of policy paradigm, the logical next step is stagnation. The political challenge we face now is how to achieve paradigm change.

Currency values, prices, consumption and incomes are at the heart of the economic performance of all countries. In order to make a meaningful comparison between one economy and another, economists routinely make use of purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, but while PPP rates are widely used and well understood, they take a lot of effort to produce and suffer from publication delays. Currencies, Commodities and Consumption analyses the strengths and weaknesses of two alternatives to PPP. Firstly, the so-called Big Mac Index, which uses hamburger prices as a standard of measurement, and second, a less well known technique which infers incomes across countries based on the proportion of consumption devoted to food. Kenneth W. Clements uses international macroeconomics, microeconomic theory and econometrics to provide researchers and policy makers with insights into alternatives to PPP rates and make sense of the ongoing instability of exchange rates and commodity prices.

A powerful new understanding of global currency trends, including the rise of the Chinese yuan At first glance, the modern history of the global economic system seems to support the long-held view that the leading world power's currency--the British pound, the U.S. dollar, and perhaps someday the Chinese yuan--invariably dominates international trade and finance. In How Global Currencies Work, three noted economists provide a reassessment of this history and the theories behind the conventional wisdom. Offering a new history of global finance over the past two centuries, and marshaling extensive new data to test established theories of how global currencies work, Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chit?u argue for a new view, in which several national monies can share international currency status, and their importance can change rapidly. They demonstrate how changes in technology and in the structure of international trade and finance have reshaped the landscape of international currencies so that several international financial standards can coexist. They show that multiple international and reserve currencies have in fact coexisted in the pastupending the traditional view of the British pound's dominance prior to 1945 and the U.S. dollar's dominance more recently. Looking forward, the book tackles the implications of this new framework for major questions facing the future of the international monetary system, from whether the euro and the Chinese yuan might address their respective challenges and perhaps rival the dollar, to how increased currency competition might affect global financial stability.

This book focuses on the concepts and applications of risk-based asset allocation. Markowitz's traditional approach to asset allocation suffers from serious drawbacks when implemented. These mainly arise from the estimation risk associated with the necessary input the most critical being expected returns. With the financial crisis, there has been an increasing interest in asset allocation approaches that don't need expected returns as input, known as risk-based approaches. The book provides an analysis of the different solutions that fit this description: the equal-weighting approach, the global minimum-variance approach, the most diversified portfolio approach and the risk parity approach. In addition to a theoretical discussion of these, it presents practical applications in different investment environments. Three different evaluation dimensions are considered to put these approaches to the test: financial efficiency, diversification and portfolio stability.

This volume marks the completion of the Collected Writings. The general index to the edition is designed to allow those interested in the development of Keynes's thought, and those interested in the history of economic thought more generally, to trace the development of his ideas throughout his career. The bibliography to the edition records all the writings of Keynes published not only in English but also in translation. It provides an indication of the process by which Keynes's writings were disseminated throughout the world. In addition, this volume includes an editorial introduction describing the principles of selection used by the editors, as well as a few items that escaped them in the preparation of earlier volumes. This volume is an essential tool for the effective use of the material in the twenty-nine other volumes of this edition.

Between the outbreak of war in 1939 and his death in April 1946, Keynes was closely involved in the management of Britain's war economy and the planning of the post-war world. This volume, the fifth of six dealing with this period, focuses on three aspects of his activities in planning the post-war world: the final stages of the discussions and negotiations that brought the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to birth at Bretton Woods and Savannah, the negotiations over commercial policy, and the discussions on reparations and the post-war treatment of Germany. On all of these subjects it contains Keynes's attempts to influence, often with success, the course of events in both Britain and America.

This volume brings together Keynes's attempts to influence public opinion and policy concerning primarily British affairs between 1922 and 1929. During this period, his major concerns were Britain's attempt to return to the gold standard and its consequences, industrial policy (especially in the cotton textile industry) and unemployment policy, although he became briefly involved in many other subjects. Most of the volume consists of Keynes's journalism for the period, but it also contains his previously unpublished evidence to official committees, anonymous contributions to The Nation and Athenaeum and related correspondence.