Real Estate Speculation as a Source of Banking and Currency Instability: Lessons from the Asian Crisis

A central feature of the Asian currency crisis was the vast prior capital inflow into the region, and the later rapid reversal of that movement. In seeking to explain why this outflow of capital took place and was so devastating for the countries concerned, various writers have laid blame upon a combination of connected lending, poor bank supervision, moral hazard and “crony capitalism”. Our emphasis is different. Much of the capital inflow financed a vast over-expansion of commercial real estate development. Plunging real estate values accompanied by severe difficulties in the banking and financial sector have been common occurrences across the region. The argument is that large international portfolio capital flows mediated by banks will usually lead to rapidly appreciating asset prices which will result in banking/currency crises.

The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI

Gear Fest

This dates back to early in the semester but it was one of my favorite River Steward experiences so far. Gear Fest happened on the first weekend of October in Eastwood Metro Park. When we got there is was about 40 degrees and raining while we set up our tents. Personally I didn\u27t do much that first night at gear fest beyond watching the slackliners warm up and eat Monchon, a sandwich cart located usually on the dark side (North Student Neighborhood) on the weekends. That night we slept in the tents and it was so cold that about 15 people slept in the same tent for warmth. In the middle of the night I we were woken up by screams because groundhogs were trying to get up out of their holes and we put the tent right on top of them. The next day after welcoming people in the morning I learned what Gear Fest was all about. I watched people mountain biking, running, kayaking, canoeing, and slacklining