In order that an organized body of knowledge might be classified as science, its hypothetical law must be based on facts. Unlike any other social science, fallacies are the root of the technique of thinking in economics. By the lapse of time theses fallacies have been accepted as if they...

Much has been written on the impact of the global financial crisis on Europe, Asia and the Americas but only little on the Arab states. This article makes an early attempt to take stock of recent developments in the Arab world and offers a systematic approach to disentangle the various...

Global current account imbalances have been at the forefront of policy debates over the past few years. Many observers have recently singled them out as a key factor contributing to the global financial crisis. Current account surpluses in several emerging market economies are said to have...

Ralph Hawtrey, one of the leading economists of the interwar period, published his first work in economics, Good and Bad Trade, in 1913. The book contains the key elements of the theoretical model developed and refined by Hawtrey over the next quarter century. Notwithstanding Pigou's judgment...

This is a top-level and short review (hopefully an eye-opener) of the factors that affect the Dollar-Euro exchange rate in the near future. It seems that the US is better positioned, than the Euro Zone, to face the current illiquidity crisis. Moreover, over the period of this crisis it is...

In this paper, I argue that there is a bug in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (both US and IFRS) which results in flawed financial statements. Fortunately, this bug is like a bad piece of SQL code – no effort is required to write new code to fix the bug, just delete the bad code.I...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the "excess financial elasticity" of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead...

As the world debates the economic crisis, it does so without considering two historically important ideas: the stigmatization of miserliness and the prohibition of usury. Although these ideas were once keystones of society, they are missing from the current discourse. This paper seeks to...

Purpose - The most prominent and persistent problems of our global monetary system are instability and imbalances. We propose an international monetary model to solve these problems while at the same time move the model closer to Maqāṣid Sharīʿah (objectives of Sharīʿah). We name this an...