Category Archives: Currencies

Does Wall Street Do “God’s Work”? Or Even Anything Useful?

Bank executives frequently proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive. There’s just one problem: the Wall Street mantra isn’t true.

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Economists Mystified that Negative Interest Rates Aren’t Leading Consumers to Run Out and Spend

It been remarkable to witness the casual way in which central banks have plunged into negative interest rate terrain, based on questionable models. Now that this experiment isn’t working out so well, the response comes troubling close to, “Well, they work in theory, so we just need to do more or wait longer to see […]

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Rebalancing, Wealth Transfers, and the Growth of Chinese Debt

By Michael Pettis, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. Cross posted from China Financial Markets. For the past ten years much of what I have written about debt in China was aimed mainly at trying to convince analysts and policymakers […]

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