"Can European Banks Survive a Unified Currency in a Nationally Segmented Capital Market?"

The euro was expected to become a substitute for the U.S. dollar as an international currency. However, compromises made during its creation make it a less than perfect substitute in the medium term. Among these compromises was the application of macro convergence and micro diversity in financial markets and supervision at the national level. This now prevents the creation of a unified capital market and places EU banks at a disadvantage when competing with U.S. banks in global markets. There were also peculiarities in the integration process that led to a single currency in the United States that suggest further institutional changes will be necessary.

"Krugman on the Liquidity Trap: Why Inflation Won't Bring Recovery In Japan"

Paul Krugman has argued that Japan is in a liquidity trap and that it can recover only if the central bank there follows a policy of "credible inflation." This paper argues that Krugman's proposal, which is similar to what Fisher proposed during the depression, is based on a different interpretation of the liquidity trap from that proposed by Keynes and as a result his policy recommendations can result in neither the elimination of the trap nor in Japan's economic recovery.

Can European Banks Survive a Unified Currency in a Nationally Segmented Capital Market?

The euro was expected to become a substitute for the U.S. dollar as an international currency. However, compromises made during its creation make it a less than perfect substitute in the medium term. Among these compromises was the application of macro convergence and micro diversity in financial markets and supervision at the national level. This now prevents the creation of a unified capital market and places EU banks at a disadvantage when competing with U.S. banks in global markets. There were also peculiarities in the integration process that led to a single currency in the United States that suggest further institutional changes will be necessary.

What we could have learned from the New Deal in confronting the recent global recession

To the extent that policymakers have learned anything at all from the Great Depression and the policy responses of the 1930s, the lessons appear to have been the wrong ones. In this public policy brief, Director of Research Jan Kregel explains why there is still a great deal we have to learn from the New Deal. He illuminates one of the New Deal's principal objectives - quelling the fear and uncertainty of mass unemployment - and the pragmatic, experimental process through which the tool for achieving this objective - directed government expenditure - came to be embraced. In the search for a blueprint from the 1930s, Kregel suggests that too much attention has been paid to the measures deployed to shore up the banking system, and that the approaches underlying the emergency financial policy measures of the recent period and those of the 1930s were actually quite similar. The more meaningful divergence between the 1930s and the post-2008 policy response, he argues, can be uncovered by comparing the actions that were taken (or not taken, as the case may be) to address the real sector of the economy following the resolution of the respective financial crises

The Relevance of Ragnar Nurkse and Classical Development Economics

In this essay we aim to show, first, how the classical development economics, that of Ragnar Nurkse's (1907-1957) generation, epitomized the best development practices of the past 500 years and crafted them into what Krugman rightly calls high development theory. It is not a coincidence that the post-World-War-II era, when Nurkse and others ruled the development mainstream, is one of exceptionally good performance for many poor countries. Second, we argue that the alleged death of the classical development economics and subsequent rise of the Washington Consensus has to do not so much with increasing modeling in economics, a way of research purposely discarded by many classical development thinkers, but much more with misunderstanding the reasons for East Asia's success and Latin America's demise; we show that the root cause of this misunderstanding - that goes in fact back to 'misreading' key passages in Adam Smith - is the role of technology, or of increasing returns activities, and of finance, in development. Third, we aim to indicate key areas of further research that the current development mainstream should pursue in order to re-learn how to create middle-income economies and middle-class jobs.

Entre la profunda recesión y la gran crisis. Nuevas interpretaciones teóricas y alternativas

El logro de un desarrollo propio desde una perspectiva latinoamericana ha estado latente a partir del a inserción de nuestro países al mercado mundial. Cómo sembrar dicho desarrollo y cómo evaluar el desempeño de las economías latinoamericanas en el contexto actual es el reto de las instituciones académicas y de quienes comprometidos con el bienestar social ponen a discusión el cómo y el por qué del curso actual de nuestras sociedades. El rumbo del desarrollo hacia el futuro se nutre del o que se ha sembrado durante las últimas décadas. El desarrollo basado en las ideas de Prebisch y en la influencia del pensamiento keynesiano tuvo su fin en los años setenta; el pensamiento hegemónico promovió un Estado minimalista y la preeminencia del mercado sobre los intereses del bienestar social

Is this the Minsky Moment for Reform of Financial Regulation?

The current financial crisis has been characterized as a 'Minsky' moment, and as such provides the conditions required for a reregulation of the financial system similar to that of the New Deal banking reforms of the 1930s. However, Minsky's theory was not one that dealt in moments but rather in systemic, structural changes in the operations of financial institutions. Therefore, the framework for reregulation must start with an understanding of the longer-term systemic changes that took place between the New Deal reforms and their formal repeal under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act. This paper attempts to identify some of those changes and their sources. In particular, it notes that the New Deal reforms were eroded by an internal process in which commercial banks that were given a monopoly position in deposit taking sought to remove those protections because unregulated banks were able to provide substitute instruments that were more efficient and unregulated but unavailable to regulated banks, since they involved securities market activities that would eventually be recognized as securitization. Regulators and the courts contributed to this process by progressively ruling that these activities were related to the regulated activities of the commercial banks, allowing them to reclaim securities market activities that had been precluded in the New Deal legislation. The 1999 Act simply made official the de facto repeal of the 1930s protections. Any attempt to provide reregulation of the system will thus require safeguards to ensure that this internal process of deregulation is not repeated