Argumenty przeciw „pieniądzom z helikoptera”

Since the outbreak of the latest financial crisis central banks in several countries have decided to apply non-conventional monetary policy measures. Other monetary authorities behaved more conventionally but conducted a very loose monetary policy anyway. The goal of the paper is to discuss threats and possible consequences of treating the money instrumentally (monetary easing, government financing by the central bank). The authorities tend to arbitrary reinforce just one function of money, a medium of exchange, in order to artificially increase the sales and production of goods and services while neglecting other major function: a store of value. Fast growing money aggregates, awareness that there is no limit for money creation, and ideas such as “helicopter money” stimulate the attempts to storage the wealth in different form, e.g. cryptocurrency. The remarks were formulated from the conventional and Islamic finance perspective. Statistical data come from the euro area, Poland, and Iran, where banking system is fully Islamic.Po wybuchu ostatniego kryzysu finansowego banki centralne szeregu krajów zaczęły wykorzystywać niekonwencjonalne instrumenty polityki pieniężnej, zaś inne, choć pozostały przy bardziej tradycyjnych instrumentach, stosowały mało restrykcyjną politykę. Celem artykułu jest omówienie niebezpieczeństw i potencjalnych konsekwencji traktowania pieniądza w sposób instrumentalny (luzowanie ilościowe i finansowanie długu publicznego przez bank centralny). Władze państwowe mają tendencję do kładzenia nacisku na tylko jedną funkcję pieniądza, a mianowicie jako środka cyrkulacji, by w sztuczny sposób zwiększyć sprzedaż oraz produkcję towarów i świadczenie usług, przy jednoczesnym lekceważeniu innej ważnej funkcji: środka tezauryzacji. Szybko rosnące agregaty monetarne, świadomość, że nie ma tak naprawdę ograniczeń w kreacji pieniądza, jak również pomysły typu „pieniądz z helikoptera” powodują, że na znaczeniu zyskują pomysły, jak przechowywać bogactwo w innej formie, np. w kryptowalutach. Rozważania w artykule są prowadzone z perspektywy dwóch konwencjonalnych banków centralnych (EBC, NBP) i jednego islamskiego (Bank Centralny Iranu)

Some Remarks on the Mass Density Distribution

The distribution of the density of mass in several simple model systems is analyzed. In particular, the relation between the localization of a particle and its mass is studied in detail. The dependence of the function describing mass density distribution on the choice of the reference point and, in this context, the process of emerging the molecular shape as a function of masses of the constituent particles is briefly discussed.(doi: 10.5562/cca2312

CONFIGURATION INTERACTION METHODS

In this article configuration interaction methods of solving the Schrödinger eigenvalue problemare reviewed. In particular computational aspects of the "traditional" and of the direct approach are briefly discussed. A special attention is given to the group-theory based formulations known as the unitary group approach and the symmetric group approach. Recent developments and implementations to relativistictheory of many-electron systems are also described.Pozna

Erfonium: A Hooke Atom with Soft Interaction Potential

Properties of erfonium, a Hooke atom with the Coulomb interaction potential $1/r$ replaced by a non-singular $\text{erf}(\mu r)/r$ potential are investigated. The structure of the Hooke atom potential and properties of its energy spectrum, relative to the ones of the spherical harmonic oscillator and of harmonium, are analyzed. It is shown, that at a certain value of $\mu$ the system changes its behavior from a harmonium-like regime to a harmonic-oscillator-like regime

Double-oracle sampling method for Stackelberg Equilibrium approximation in general-sum extensive-form games

The paper presents a new method for approximating Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium in general-sum sequential games with imperfect information and perfect recall. The proposed approach is generic as it does not rely on any specific properties of a particular game model. The method is based on iterative interleaving of the two following phases: (1) guided Monte Carlo Tree Search sampling of the Follower's strategy space and (2) building the Leader's behavior strategy tree for which the sampled Follower's strategy is an optimal response. The above solution scheme is evaluated with respect to expected Leader's utility and time requirements on three sets of interception games with variable characteristics, played on graphs. A comparison with three state-of-the-art MILP/LP-based methods shows that in vast majority of test cases proposed simulation-based approach leads to optimal Leader's strategies, while excelling the competitive methods in terms of better time scalability and lower memory requirements

Andromeda: A Few-body Plane Wave Calculator

At TACCSTER last year, a novel method of ours to solve the 3-body lithium problem was presented. Without finishing, the computation plateaued at -7.3 (of -7.4) Hartree on an L = 67 ^ 9 grid running on a single TACC Lonestar5 node for three months. We have now released a new version of the Andromeda code capable of embarrassingly parallel operations. This improvement followed from a significant speedup of half the process, namely the free and exact creation of the Hamiltonian quantum operators and their operation in Sums of Products form. Even though this does not speed up the vector decomposition process, which is still the rate-limiting step, we can now distribute processing per term-state combination across numerous computational resources to overcome this problem. In particular, any 2-body interaction quantum operator is now a summation of processes defined by separate 1-body matrices for the 2-body diagonal, 1-body diagonal, and off-diagonal aspects of the quantum operation. Thus, every core in a parallel process can individually initialize the Coulombic quantum operator, which allows embarrassingly parallel operations across several state vectors. The current release has integrated the TACC/launcher as a vehicle to handle parallel operations. Digitize your wave function with the most local representation of the plane-wave basis. Tackle strongly correlated problems with a spatial component separated, but fully multi-body, Sums-of-Products representation. Compute 3-body quantum physics with a powerful scripting interface. Discover something

How effective is Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) in predicting negative macroeconomic phenomena?

PURPOSE: The evaluation of the predictive power of Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) indicators is crucial for coordinating the economic policies of the EU countries. MIP is one of the pillars of the economic crisis prevention procedure.DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Using the Bayesian model averaging (BMA) framework, we compare different models where lagged MIP indicators try to explain several macroeconomic variables associated with crises.FINDINGS: The results show that the importance of MIP indicators between 2001 and 2017 was diversified. In the case of annual real GDP growth, including a 1-year lagged house price index, nominal unit labor cost, real effective exchange rate (1-year change), and export market share in the model improves the model's explanatory power most. For explaining inflation rate, export market share (again), and house price index is valid.PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The construction of the MIP procedure should be simplified, as not all indicators have a fundamental capability of predicting excessive imbalances which result in crisis events. Indicators are relevant to the current economic priorities of the EU, which do not have a significant capacity to anticipate crisis phenomena should be excluded from the Alert Mechanism.ORIGINALITY/VALUE: We use the Bayesian model averaging (BMA) framework BMA that directly deals with heterogeneity by finding a combination of regressors that account for it to the greatest extent within a conditioning set of information. Consequently, BMA appears to be ideally suited for finding robust determinants of "crisis" variables.The project was financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland under the program "Regional Initiative of Excellence" 2019 - 2022 project number 015/RID/2018/19 total funding amount 10 721 040,00 PLN.peer-reviewe

Goodhart's Law in Reinforcement Learning

Implementing a reward function that perfectly captures a complex task in the real world is impractical. As a result, it is often appropriate to think of the reward function as a proxy for the true objective rather than as its definition. We study this phenomenon through the lens of Goodhart's law, which predicts that increasing optimisation of an imperfect proxy beyond some critical point decreases performance on the true objective. First, we propose a way to quantify the magnitude of this effect and show empirically that optimising an imperfect proxy reward often leads to the behaviour predicted by Goodhart's law for a wide range of environments and reward functions. We then provide a geometric explanation for why Goodhart's law occurs in Markov decision processes. We use these theoretical insights to propose an optimal early stopping method that provably avoids the aforementioned pitfall and derive theoretical regret bounds for this method. Moreover, we derive a training method that maximises worst-case reward, for the setting where there is uncertainty about the true reward function. Finally, we evaluate our early stopping method experimentally. Our results support a foundation for a theoretically-principled study of reinforcement learning under reward misspecification

Probabilistic Programming Interfaces for Random Graphs::Markov Categories, Graphons, and Nominal Sets

We study semantic models of probabilistic programming languages over graphs, and establish a connection to graphons from graph theory and combinatorics. We show that every well-behaved equational theory for our graph probabilistic programming language corresponds to a graphon, and conversely, every graphon arises in this way.We provide three constructions for showing that every graphon arises from an equational theory. The first is an abstract construction, using Markov categories and monoidal indeterminates. The second and third are more concrete. The second is in terms of traditional measure theoretic probability, which covers 'black-and-white' graphons. The third is in terms of probability monads on the nominal sets of Gabbay and Pitts. Specifically, we use a variation of nominal sets induced by the theory of graphs, which covers Erdős-Rényi graphons. In this way, we build new models of graph probabilistic programming from graphons

First Measurements of Spin-Dependent Double-Differential Cross Sections and the GDH Integrand from \vec{^3He}(\vec{\gamma},n)pp at Incident Photon Energies of 12.8 and 14.7 MeV

The first measurement of the three-body photodisintegration of longitudinally-polarized ^3He with a circularly-polarized \gamma-ray beam was carried out at the High Intensity \gamma-ray Source (HI\gamma S) facility located at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). The spin-dependent double-differential cross sections and the contributions from the three-body photodisintegration to the ^3He GDH integrand are presented and compared with state-of-the-art three-body calculations at the incident photon energies of 12.8 and 14.7 MeV. The data reveal the importance of including the Coulomb interaction between protons in three-body calculations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted in Physical Review Letter