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)…
Crisis
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…
Bank Resolution Is Dead: Authorities Dare not Use it – and instead Risk Destroying Capital Markets
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…
EU Energy Markets: Are there any market failures out there to be fixed?
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…
FTX Could Be ‘Game Over’ for Central Bank Digital Currency and for Other Dominos
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’ explained: the first bailout of the new Global Financial Crisis
‘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 Eurosystem: a parasite serving only the needs of the Eurozone public sector
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…
What game-theoretic analysis tells us about the possibility that the actual conflict will escalate
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…