Crisis

Speculative bubbles are not the product of irrational behaviour, as many tend to believe. When the price increase of given sets of goods or assets (bitcoins, tulip bulbs, houses, stocks)…

Since the beginning of March, US regulators have closed and sold three banks: Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic. The failures are the biggest to hit the US…

The template created after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 to shield taxpayers from direct bailouts of failed banks has already folded – authorities dare not use it. The template…

This important topic will be discussed in a talk by the IREF scholar Patricia Commun. Register here for an insightful discussion. The event will take place at the Anglo-American University…

Up until recently, the proponents of the cluster of financial developments around the Great Re-Set, Decentralized Finance, Central Bank Digital Currency, Financial Inclusion, Fintech, Open Banking et al have had…

‘Liability Driven Investment’ or ‘LDI’ is both a nonsense and a truism, and is now a byword for a disaster in the UK financial system. Here is what happened. As…

Corona bonuses for the public sector, mask vouchers for pensioners, and state-subsidized family vacations – feel-good policies are making a big comeback in the wake of the pandemic. However, the administrative, marketing, and procurement…

The European Central Bank (ECB) held its latest Governing Council meeting on 14 April 2022 and issued its normal press release. It also included a facile graphic titled ‘Our monetary…

Russia’s President Putin conducts a bloody war in Ukraine. The German government struggles to impose sanctions that could endanger Russian gas supplies. The Wirtschaftswoche headlines: “Putin has Germany under control…

About 60 years ago, Nobel laureate Thomas Shelling published a book titled “The strategy of conflict”. It was written during the cold war and reflects the typical worries of the…