Risk facing U.S. commercial banks

The study examines the financial state of the U.S. commercial banks and of the main private borrowing sectors: corporate non-financial business and households. The study finds that the condition of the banks'loan portfolios exposes them to high losses. This risk together with the forthcoming increase of the required ratio of capital to assets suggests that banks will respond by slowing the growth of credit. One consequence would be weaker U.S. investment and consumption. Moreover, credit would probably be directed away from higher risk borrowers such as the highly indebted countries.Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

Linking wages to changing output prices : an empirical study of 13 industrial countries

A shock that lowers profits depresses employment less when wages are flexible in terms of the value-added output price. This kind of flexibility allows a country to remain competitive in world markets when a shock to profits lowers its value-added output price. In many countries, wages are indexed to consumer prices, thus protecting the real income of workers in the short run. Some industrial countries link wages more closely to the value-added output price. Estimates of the elasticity of wages in terms of the value-added output price are high, significant, and of a theoretically plausible magnitude in three industrial countries that perform well in world markets: Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. The ouput price elasticity of wages also appears high in two industrial countries that produce primary products: Canada and Australia. This may reflect the difficulty of passing wage increases on to higher commodity prices. Wage flexibility may be particularly important for developing countries exporting primary products.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Banks&Banking Reform

The decommodified security ratio:A tool for assessing European social protection systems

With a view to better assessment of the roles played by social security and social policy in determining well-being, this article introduces the ”decommodified security ratio“ (DSR), an instrument for evaluating an important duty of the social State, namely to maintain and improve people's economic security. To that end we describe the conventions for its use, analyse its maincomponents in 20 European countries in 2002 and simulate the changes in it produced by ten variations in those components. From an analysis of the sensitivities of economic security we then demonstrate three different rationales.security; uncommodification; indicator

A Credit Market à la David Hume

In Book III of his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume considers the following simple interaction: "I suppose a person to have lent me a sum of money, on condition that it be restor'd in a few days, and also suppose, that after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum" and Hume asks: "What reason or motive have I to restore the money?" [1740, p. 479] The answer, he concludes, must be "that the sense of justice and injustice [which is the motive for repaying the loan] is not deriv'd from nature, but arises artificially, tho' necessarily, from education and human conventions." [p. 483] It is my purpose in this essay to offer formal (and modern) underpinnings for Hume's argument. I shall do so in the context of Hume's own example, cited above, where the interaction being considered is one between lender and borrower.lending, borrowing, credit market

On two problems of Erdos and Hechler: New methods in singular Madness

For an infinite cardinal mu, MAD(mu) denotes the set of all cardinalities of nontrivial maximal almost disjoint families over mu. Erdos and Hechler proved the consistency of [mu in MAD(mu)] for a singular cardinal mu and asked if it was ever possible for a singular mu that [mu notin MAD(mu)], and also whether 2^{cf(mu)} [mu in MAD(mu)] for every singular cardinal mu. We introduce a new method for controlling MAD(mu) for a singular mu and, among other new results about the structure of MAD(mu) for singular mu, settle both problems affirmatively

Baryogenesis from Unstable Domain Walls

There exists a class of cosmic strings that turn matter into antimatter (Alice strings). In a GUT where the unbroken gauge group contains charge conjugation ($C$), such strings form when a phase transition renders $C$ a discrete symmetry. They become boundaries of domain walls at a later, $C$-breaking transition. These `Alice walls' are cosmologically harmless, but can play an important role in baryogenesis. We present a three-generation toy model with scalar baryons, where a quasi-static Alice wall (or a gas of such walls) temporarily gives rise to net baryogenesis of uniform sign everywhere in space. This becomes a permanent baryon excess if the wall shrinks away early enough. We comment on the possible relevance of a similar mechanism to baryogenesis in a realistic \soten unification model, where Alice walls would form at the scale of left-right symmetry breaking.Comment: SLAC-PUB-5828, May 92. 28 pp. Seven figures (not included). Use PHYZZ

Cryopreservation of a whole liver

Preservation of vascularized organs such as the liver is limited to 24hrs. before destructive processes disqualify it for transplantation. This narrow time window prevents surgeons from performing optimal pathogen screening and matching tests which often lead to re-transplantation. Numerous problems are associated with viably freezing and thawing a whole liver: complicated geometry, poor heat transfer, release of latent heat and the difficulty of generating a uniform cooling rate. Our past success led us to apply our novel freezing technique to a larger solid organ, the liver. Whole livers were frozen/thawed using a directional solidification apparatuses; viability was tested by means of integrity and functionality in vitro and in auxiliary liver transplantation. Thawed livers were intact with over 80% viability; histology revealed normal architecture, bile production and blood flow following auxillary transplantation where normal. Our results suggest a novel cryopreservation method and may enable better organ donor-recipient matching in the futur