Peace... like prosperity?

Arab Spring, Syria and now in Europe's threshold; Ukraine...
A thought of mine: perhaps we should not take peace and security for granted as we did for our heyday before 2007.

 Remember the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize? What an irony...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The good, the bad and... the austeritist!

This post is an attempt to use my rather inexperienced and naive instinct in economics in order to respond to the allegations of the necessity of austerity and tight monetary policy. More specifically, I post  my reply to the arguments presented in "The Live arguments of austerity right now: A bestiary" by Mr. DeLong . Please, forgive me if I am wrong. The first group stresses the importance of tight monetary policy. "The Jeremy Stein argument" : Stein ignores the other element of GDP; the consumption. With lower interest rates households can more easily substitute future for current income. Secondly, risk premium is added to the risk-free rate both when the risk-free is 0% and when it is higher, e.g. 10%, and hence risky assets yield by definition higher returns regardless the level of the risk-free rate. Therefore, bank managers will always prefer more risky assets due to the higher returns they offer anyway. Thirdly, there is always the Basel Accord tha
Read more

Economic complications of a Cyexit

Over the past few days, the Cyexite scenario has been communicated several times, either via journalists or bloggers and some other times as a leverage for negotiations... I shall  examine some implications of this undesired though improbable- if you ask me- scenario First of all, Cypriot firms, both financial and non-financial, and households have issued debt denominated in Euro, such as loans, bonds, commercial credit, cheques etc. Then, in case Cypriot pound (CP) substitutes for euro a practical question arises: the just mentioned debt will be repaid in what currency? If some of you see an obvious answer, please take some time to reconsider your thoughts. First of all, the debt holder will have to agree to be paid back in an other that the agreed currency and then he will have to negotiate the exchange rate this will happen (for now let us ignore the exchange rate related problems). On the other hand, the debt issuers, will have to find adequate funds to pay back its borrowers bo
Read more

It's the animal spirits!

Image
After DeLong's " L ESS THAN 100,000 PAYROLL JOBS, A 58.5% EMPLOYMENT-TO-ADULT-POPULATION RATIO EXACTLY WHERE IT WAS A YEAR AGO, AND LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION DOWN BY 0.5 PERCENTAGE POINTS IN THE PAST YEAR " I once more started thinking of the Keynesian animal spirits . Keynes attributed the so called "Great 1929 Depression", back in 1933, to the low profit expectations of the business coordinators and other economic agents. As a result, investment was being gravely hindered by the adverse economic environment and by the blunted consumption (demand) resulted by the unemployment.  Bradford DeLong  is anxiously concerning for what he could reply to future "whippersnapper economic historians who will come to interview him" for the currently sluggish economic activity of the US. I do not blame him! He does not overreact, either! I have something in mind that could serve as an answer to future historical quests. It has been a while since I first started
Read more