"Asset Prices, Liquidity Preference, and the Business Cycle"

In his Treatise on Money, Keynes relied on two different premises to argue that the interest rate need not rise with rising levels of expenditure. One of these was the elasticity of the money supply, and the other was the interaction between financial and industrial circulation. A decrease (increase) in what Keynes called the bear position was similar in its impact to that of a policy-induced increase (decrease) in the money supply. In his General Theory, this second line of argument lost much of its force as it became reformulated under the rubric of Keynes's liquidity preference theory of interest. Assuming that the interest rate sets the return on capital, Keynes dismissed the effect of bull or bear sentiment in equity markets as a second-order complication that can be ignored in analyzing the equilibrium level of investment and output. The objective of this paper is to go back to this old theme from the Treatise and underscore its importance for the Keynesian theory of the business cycle.

"On the Minskyan Business Cycle"

The essential insight Minsky drew from Keynes was that optimistic expectations about the future create a margin, reflected in higher asset prices, which makes it possible for borrowers to access finance in the present. In other words, the capitalized expected future earnings work as the collateral against which firms can borrow in financial markets or from banks. But, then, the value of long-lived assets cannot be assessed on any firm basis, as they are highly sensitive to the degree of confidence that markets have about certain events and circumstances that will unfold in the future. This means that any sustained shortfall in economic performance in relation to the level of expectations that are already capitalized in asset prices may promote the view that asset prices are excessive. Once the view that asset prices are excessive takes hold in financial markets, higher asset prices cease to be a stimulant. Initially debt-led, the economy becomes debt-burdened. In this article, it is argued that Keynes's views on the alternation of the "bull" and "bear" sentiment and asset price speculation over the business cycle can explain two of Minsky's central propositions relative to business cycle turning points that have often been found less than fully persuasive: (1) that financial fragility increases gradually over the expansion, and, (2) that the interest rate sooner or later, increases setting off a downward spiral bringing the expansion to an end.

"Speculation, Liquidity Preference, and Monetary Circulation"

The sharp exchanges that Keynes had with some of his critics on the loanable funds theory made it harder to appreciate the degree to which his thought was continuous with the tradition of monetary analysis that emanates from Wicksell, of which Keynes's A Treatise on Money was a part. In the aftermath of the General Theory (GT), many of Keynes's insights in the Treatise were lost or abandoned because they no longer fit easily in the truncated theoretical structure he adopted in his latter work. A part of Keynes's analysis in the Treatise which emphasized the importance of financial conditions and asset prices in determining firms' investment decisions was later revived by Minsky, but another part, about the way self-sustained biases in asset price expectations in financial markets exerted their influence over the business cycle, was mainly forgotten. This paper highlights Keynes's early insights on asset price speculation and its link to monetary circulation, at the risk perhaps, of downplaying the importance of the GT.

"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 speculationÓ 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.

"Is the Dollar at Risk?"

A massive fiscal stimulus and, until recently, aggressive monetary easing have been successful in raising bond and real estate prices to unprecedented levels, inducing a credit boom that has prevented private consumption from falling. While it might still be too early to say that it worked, the strategy has indeed, for the time being, prevented the U.S. economy from slipping into a severe depression after the collapse of the stock market at the turn of the millennium.

Stereochemistry of Polypeptide Conformation in Coarse Grained Analysis

The conformations available to polypeptides are determined by the interatomic forces acting on the peptide units, whereby backbone torsion angles are restricted as described by the Ramachandran plot. Although typical proteins are composed predominantly from {\alpha}-helices and {\beta}-sheets, they nevertheless adopt diverse tertiary structure, each folded as dictated by its unique amino-acid sequence. Despite such uniqueness, however, the functioning of many proteins involves changes between quite different conformations. The study of large-scale conformational changes, particularly in large systems, is facilitated by a coarse-grained representation such as provided by virtually bonded C{\alpha} atoms. We have developed a virtual atom molecular mechanics (VAMM) force field to describe conformational dynamics in proteins and a VAMM-based algorithm for computing conformational transition pathways. Here we describe the stereochemical analysis of proteins in this coarse-grained representation, comparing the relevant plots in coarse-grained conformational space to the corresponding Ramachandran plots, having contoured each at levels determined statistically from residues in a large database. The distributions shown for an all-{\alpha} protein, two all-{\beta} proteins and one {\alpha}+{\beta} protein serve to relate the coarse-grained distributions to the familiar Ramachandran plot.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Postprint of book chapter submitted to the Biomolecular Forms and Functions, M. Bansal and N. Srinivasan, Eds. copyright (2013) [copyright World Scientific Publishing Company

The Effect of Air-Exposed Layer on Electrical Properties of Cu/n-Si/Al Schottky Diodes

In this work, we studied the effect of air-exposed layer on the current-voltage (I-V) capacitance versus voltage (C-V) and capacitance versus frequency (C-f) characteristics of Cu/n-Si/Al Schottky diodes. We fabricated with and without thin oxide layer Cu/n-Si/Al diodes. Firstly, n-Si wafer having (100) oriented and 15 Ω.cm resistivity was cut into eight pieces labeled Diode 1 (D1) to Diode 8 (D8). We formed the referents Cu/n-Si/Al Schottky diode (D1) which has not exposed to air. Rest of the samples, before formation of Schottky contact, was exposed to clean air at the room temperature for 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48 and 64 days. Therefore, Schottky contact with native oxide layer on the polished n-Si surface was obtained. From ln(I)-V plot of the Cu/n-Si/Al diodes, ideality factor (n), barrier height (eb), the interface state density of the Schottky junctions (Ns), saturation current (I0) and serial resistor (RS) were calculated. In addition, same parameters were verified using both Cheung functions and C-2-V characteristics. Moreover, the interface state densities of the Schottky junctions versus energy Ns-(Ec-Es) also was calculated and plotted. What causes to excess capacity of the space charge have also been investigated. While the value of ideality factor and series resistance increased with increasing exposure time to air, the barrier height Φb value of the Schottky diode with oxide layer is smaller than those without oxide layer. This is attributed to formation oxide layer occurring between interfaces of metal and semiconductor surface

Electrospray painted article containing thermally exfoliated graphite oxide and method for their manufacture

A painted polymer part containing a conductive polymer composition containing at least one polymer and a modified graphite oxide material, which is a thermally exfoliated graphite oxide with a surface area of from about 300 sq m/g to 2600 sq m/g, wherein the painted polymer part has been electrospray painted

Grain yield and some physiological traits associated with heat tolerance in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes

This research was carried out in the experimental fields of Department of Field Crops, Faculty of Agriculture, the University of Namık Kemal in 2014-2015. In the study, totally 30 bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes (15 cultivars; early, medium-early and late-maturing 10 lines are tolerant to the heat-temperature stress which were provided by CIMMYT-International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), 5 lines (were taken from the same university’s wheat breeding program which was collaborated by the CIMMYT) were used as an experimental material. The experiment was adjusted in a split-plot design with 3 replicates. Sowing dates (Normal (NS ? November 09, 2014) and Late sowing (LS ? January 09, 2015)) were constituted the main plots, and the genotypes constituted the sub-plots. These physiological traits ((membrane thermostability (MT), canopy temperature (CT), leaf chlorophyll content (LCC) and stomatal conductance (SC)) were measured at the LS stage due to giving much more correct, logical and meaningful results, but grain yield (GY) was fixed for all the sowing dates. Obtained findings are: The GY was varied between (4.35- 6.34 t ha-1) for genotypes; the MT was changed between (10.58-66.25%); the CT was realized between (17.67-22.00 oC); the LCC was varied between (38.30-53.30 SPAD) and the SC was changed between (25.20-166.80 mmol m-2 s-1). It was observed that most of the CIMMYT originated genotypes are tolerant to high-temperature stress and most of the wheats that are grown in Thrace Region are negatively affected by the high-temperature stress. © Ankara Üniversitesi Ziraat Fakültesi.AR.14.15This work was supported by the Office of Scientific Research Projects of Tekirda? Nam?k Kemal University (Project No. NKUBAP.00.24.AR.14.15).This work was supported by the Office of Scientific Research Projects of Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University (Project No. NKUBAP.00.24.AR.14.15)