Solving the problem of small change

Coinage ; Money

The case of the undying debt

The French government currently honors a very unusual debt contract: an annuity that was issued in 1738 and currently yields €1.20 per year. I tell the story of this unique debt, which serves as an anecdotal but symbolic summary of French public finances since the 18th century.Debts, Public

Government equity and money: John Law’s system in 1720 France

John Law’s System was a radical restructuring of French public finances, carried out from 1716 to 1720. It involved on the one hand a conversion of the existing French public debt into something like government equity, on the other hand the replacement of commodity money with fiat money. For strategic reasons, Law supported the equity at too high a level, resulting in uncontrolled money creation. The System ended with the recreation of a public debt at, surprisingly, the same level as before.France ; Debts, Public ; Money

The household balance sheet: too much debt?

Debt ; Consumption (Economics)

The crime of 1873: back to the scene

Milton Friedman's (1990) counterfactual analysis of what would have happened if the United States had not abandoned bimetallism in 1873 is revisited in a general equilibrium model of bimetallism. I find that bimetallism would have survived and the gold-silver ratio would have remained stable for another twenty years. If countries such as India that abandoned silver because of its depreciation are assumed not to, bimetallism survives to World War I. But the United States would have experienced a sharp bout of inflation in the early 20th century, although milder if India stays on silver.Bimetallism ; Silver

What’s a penny (or a nickel) really worth?

On December 14, 2006, the United States Mint announced new regulations to limit the melting and exportation of pennies and nickels. The goal is to prevent a shortage of small change in circulation. This article looks at the problem in historical context and suggests solutions.Coinage ; Money

Chronicles of a deflation unforetold

Suppose the nominal money supply could be cut literally overnight by, say, 20%. What would happen to prices, wages, output? The answer can be found in 1720s France, where just such an experiment was carried out, repeatedly. Prices adjusted instantaneously and fully on one market only, that for foreign exchange. Prices on other markets (such as commodities) as well as prices of manufactured goods and industrial wages fell slowly, over many months, and not by the full amount of the nominal reduction. Coincidentally or not, the industrial sector (as represented by manufacturing of woolen cloths) experienced a contraction of 30%. When the government changed course and increased the nominal money supply overnight by 20%, prices responded much more, and the woolen industry rebounded.Deflation (Finance) ; Prices

The oxalato complexes of titanium(IV)—I : Mononuclear Ti(OH)2(C2O4)22− in solution

Molecular weight, electrodialysis and anion exchange measurements between pH 1 and 4 showed that the titanyl oxalate anion is present in solution as mononuclear Ti(OH)2(C2O4)22 units. pH studies of solutions of (NH4)2TiO(C2O4)2·H2O in 0.5 M NaClO4 medium and computer evaluation and simulation by LETAGROP and HALTAFALL showed that the behaviour of such solutions can be simulated by applying stability constants of log β1 = 7.90 ± 0.02 and log β2 = 13.24 ± 0.07, when using hydrolysis constants given by Nazarenko et al.\ud \ud In an attempt to determine the stability constant β2 spectrophotometrically using an exchange method with pyrocatechol, a mixed ligand complex was found with a Ti:pyrocatechol:oxalate ratio of 1 : 1 : 1

Neural blackboard architectures of combinatorial structures in cognition

Human cognition is unique in the way in which it relies on combinatorial (or compositional) structures. Language provides ample evidence for the existence of combinatorial structures, but they can also be found in visual cognition. To understand the neural basis of human cognition, it is therefore essential to understand how combinatorial structures can be instantiated in neural terms. In his recent book on the foundations of language, Jackendoff described four fundamental problems for a neural instantiation of combinatorial structures: the massiveness of the binding problem, the problem of 2, the problem of variables and the transformation of combinatorial structures from working memory to long-term memory. This paper aims to show that these problems can be solved by means of neural ‘blackboard’ architectures. For this purpose, a neural blackboard architecture for sentence structure is presented. In this architecture, neural structures that encode for words are temporarily bound in a manner that preserves the structure of the sentence. It is shown that the architecture solves the four problems presented by Jackendoff. The ability of the architecture to instantiate sentence structures is illustrated with examples of sentence complexity observed in human language performance. Similarities exist between the architecture for sentence structure and blackboard architectures for combinatorial structures in visual cognition, derived from the structure of the visual cortex. These architectures are briefly discussed, together with an example of a combinatorial structure in which the blackboard architectures for language and vision are combined. In this way, the architecture for language is grounded in perception