This study analyzes the interaction between the aggregate trading behavior of technical models and stock price fluctuations in the S&P 500 futures market. It examines 2580 widely used trading systems based on 30-minutes-prices. The sample comprises trend-following as well as contrarian models. I...

This paper investigates how technical trading systems exploit the momentum and reversal effects in the S&P 500 spot and futures market. When based on daily data, the profitability of 2580 technical models has steadily declined since 1960, and has been unprofitable since .the early 1990s....

Neither a gradually rising carbon tax nor emission trading schemes can ensure that the costs of emitting greenhouse gases, in particular CO2, will steadily rise faster than the general price level. If, e.g., global fossil energy prices decline faster than a carbon tax or the emission permit...

The deepening of the recent crisis was driven by the simultaneous devaluation of stock wealth, housing wealth and commodity wealth. The potential for this devaluation process had been "built up" during the boom of stock prices, house prices and commodity prices between 2003 and 2007. Hence, this...

In letzter Zeit wurden einige kritische Äußerungen zur Rolle des US-Dollar als Leitwährung laut. Sollte er als Weltleit- und Reservewährung ersetzt werden? Lukas Menkhoff, Universität Hannover, sieht den US-Dollar »längst in der Phase des Siechtums als internationale Leitwährung«. Der...

The forecast of global economic trends until 2014 is based on the following assumptions: in the advanced economies, monetary policy will remain expansionary also in the medium term, albeit not as strongly as in the most recent past. Key interest rates will remain at an average of 2.4 percent in...

Over the past three decades, trading in asset markets has become progressively more short-term oriented ("faster"), with traders attempting to exploit intraday price trends. Yet, over this time, asset prices have continued to move in a sequence of alternating "bull markets" and "bear markets",...

The idea of introducing a general financial transaction tax (FTT) has recently attracted rising attention. There are three reasons for this interest: First, the economic crisis was deepened by the instability of stock prices, exchange rates and commodity prices. This instability might be...

Initially this paper outlines the concept of a tax on all transactions to do with financial assets. It summarises the main arguments for and against such a tax. The next part documents the relevant empirical evidence necessary to be able to evaluate the arguments. In particular the development...

Ever since the early 1990s, the USA has been growing at a markedly higher rate than the Eurozone, with Germany finding itself at the tail end of growth. Three factors contributed to this development: first, the different impact of stock price dynamics on investment and consumption in the USA and...