281,149 research outputs found
Europe on the Brink
Europe’s efforts to stabilize its finances are failing, and the region needs to prepare for widespread restructuring of sovereign and bank debt. Peter Boone and Simon Johnson argue that Europe’s financial system has relied on a policy of protecting creditors from default and has thus spread pervasive moral hazard—a presumption by creditors that they will not take losses on their loans to Greece and other ailing countries. The authors argue that this situation is no longer tenable and examine three possible scenarios for the coming months as the sovereign debt crisis evolves. Under the first scenario, the euro area would try to reassert its commitment to avoid defaults and inflation. This continuation of the moral hazard regime would require severe austerity for Greece and other countries on the periphery of the euro area. The second scenario involves elimination of the moral hazard regime. The euro area would admit that some sovereigns have too much debt. A series of debt restructurings would follow. The final scenario would be for policymakers to continue to contradict themselves by promising selective defaults or restructurings of some countries’ debts while maintaining that they can ensure the stability of the rest of the euro area. But the authors argue that it is an illusion to believe that selective restructuring would not introduce contagion. Such an approach would result in panic, massive capital flight, and disorderly defaults. The ensuing chaos would in turn lead to a negatively charged political atmosphere that would make consensus nearly impossible.
A twistor-like D=10 superparticle action with manifest N=8 world-line supersymmetry
We propose a new formulation of the Brink-Schwarz superparticle which
is manifestly invariant under both the target-space super-Poincar\'e group and
the world-line local superconformal group. This twistor-like construction
naturally involves the sphere as a coset space of the Lorentz
group. The action contains only a finite set of auxiliary fields, but they
appear in unusual trilinear combinations. The origin of the on-shell
fermionic symmetry of the standard Brink-Schwarz formulation is
explained. The coupling to a super-Maxwell background requires a new
mechanism, in which the electric charge appears only on shell as an integration
constant.Comment: 22pages, standard LATEX fil
On the Brink: Chesapeake's Native Oysters
This CBF report finds that Chesapeake Bay oysters are developing natural resistance to the diseases that have so devastated the Bay's oyster population in recent decades and calls for additional sanctuaries to repopulate the species
Introduction to the Terascale
We briefly review the status of the electroweak theory, in the Standard Model
and beyond, on the brink of the LHC start.Comment: Lecture given at the SLAC Summer Institute, July 200
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