This paper analyzes how government intervention in the market for banks' troubled assets is best designed, and also uses this analysis to evaluate the public-private investment program announced by the U.S. government in March 2009. I begin by presenting the case for using government funds to...

The recent European economic crisis has dramatically exposed the failures of the various institutional mechanisms in place to maintain economic stability in Europe, and has unveiled the difficulty in achieving international coordination on fiscal and financial stability policies. Drawing on the...

This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...

The basic thesis is that the modern 'financial revolution', usually dated to eighteenth century England, but far more properly to the sixteenth-century Netherlands, in terms of those institutions for both government finance (borrowing) and international finance (bills of exchange), owed its...

Globalization and strengthening of integration processes have, among other things, also influenced some solutions relating to monetary sovereignty of particular countries. A great number of transition countries as well as some other underdeveloped countries are facing both inefficiency in their...

What is the current state of sovereign credit risk across Euro zone? Does the recent fiscal crisis extend to other (non Euro zone) countries? Is Greece the center of the problem? How did the current fiscal crisis in the Euro area start? Who is behind it? Why can it evolve? How can it be...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

In 2003 China posted its highest economic growth rate in seven years, a robust 9.1 percent. Today the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) dwarfs by more than eight fold its level of 1978, the year China began taking its first tentative steps away from a centrally-planned communist economy...

This note discusses the external environment, economic outlook, and key policy challenges for the six South East European Countries (SEE6)—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), Kosovo, the former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia—as they seek to reignite economic...