An Operator Approach To String Equations

In this paper, a new approach to string dynamics is proposed. String coordinates are identified with a non-commuting set of operators familiar from free string quantization, and the dynamics follows from the Virasoro algebra. There is a very large gauge group operating on the non-commuting coordinates. The gauge has to be fixed suitably to make contact with the standard string picture.Comment: 22 pages (latex, no other macros needed

Eager, Pragmatic or Reluctant: Can Common Finno-Ugric Ethnic and Linguistic Links Substantiate Intra-EU CFSP Co-operation?

The paper discusses the salience of the Finno-Ugric links in substantiating intra-EU cooperation among Finland, Estonia and Hungary. The focus is on investigating evidence of such cooperation in the EU's human rights and minority rights related policies towards the Russian Federation and other eastern neighbourhood states. The paper gives an account of institutionalised forms of cultural and political co-operation among the three countries under study. It discusses whether small EU states can coalesce under constructive policy alliances or not. The paper presents the current foreign policy narratives in Finland, Hungary and Estonia and locates the Finno-Ugric narrative in this general framework.Finland, Hungary, Estonia, Finno-Ugrism, EU, ENP, CFSP

Macroeconomics of Speculation

Despite his emphasis on the speculative character of investment decisions, Minsky paid little attention to asset price speculation per se, ignoring asset price bubbles and their macroeconomic effects. That is perhaps because his views were formed during the era of financial regulation, when speculation “could do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.” Clearly, times have since changed. Keynes’s old warning that the situation “… is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation” has begun to ring true again. To deepen our understanding of financial fragility under present-day conditions, the paper builds on Keynes’s insights in his General Theory on the stock exchange by going back to his Treatise, where asset price expectations and speculation play an integral part in his analysis of the business cycle. More specifically, it develops the macroeconomic implications of some of his arguments that have mainly been eclipsed by his GT. These can be summarized in three related propositions: (1) asset price expectations systematically exhibit self-sustained biases in one direction or another over the business cycle; (2) once an asset price bubble emerges no automatic mechanism exists to check the deviation of prices from their true values; and, (3) mean reversion in asset prices over time plays itself out through a rise in inactive money balances in the banking system, which Keynes called the bear position, as more and more people begin to think that asset prices have reached levels that are unreasonable. This early picture of how financial variables interact with output determination over the business cycle is contrasted with Keynes’s better known analysis in the GT, which, it is argued, does not lend itself as readily to analyzing asset price misalignments.asset prices, speculation, business cycle, keynesian theory