One simple graph by the Thomas M. Hoenig, Vice Chairman of the U.S.’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on how big banks (defined as those with assets over $10 billion) in the U.S. have become bigger and bigger in the past three decades. Simon Johnson summarizes his observations nicely: The facts may startle you. In 1984, […]
More than five years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I decided to take a deep dive on the mechanics behind the derivatives world. One of the most interesting documents was the report by Lehman’s court-appointed bankruptcy examiner Anton R. Valukas, which runs 2,200 pages (disclaimer: I did not finish reading all!). The report shed light on accounting […]
I still remember the days of studying dynamic optimization in my advanced macroeconomic class in the MPA/ID program. A few students like myself once moaned about the difficulty and “irrelevance” of dynamic optimization to the real world. Indeed, “optimal control”, a key approach to dynamic optimization, was developed in the 1950s during the space race, and […]
Chinese around the globe were outraged by a comment by a boy on Jimmy Kimmel Live, in which he joked about killing Chinese people to help erase the U.S. debt. ABC swiftly apologized, saying the network “would never purposefully broadcast anything to upset the Chinese community, Asian community, anyone of Chinese descent or any community at large.” According […]
I applaud President Obama’s decision to nominate Janet Yellen to be the next Fed chairwoman — indeed, the first chairwoman in the Fed’s history. This is very much a victory of the public: the White House clearly favored the other top candidate Lawrence Summers, and if it weren’t the strong opposition by the general public […]
Lobbying by financial firms is nothing new. In the past decade the finance and real estate industries more than doubled spending on lobbyists, reaching $474m in 2010, according to FT, citing figures from the Center for Responsive Politics. An IMF working paper published in 2009 found that banks which spent more on lobbying performed the […]
Bad money drives out good. But does virtual money drives out real? That sounds a laughable idea at first: why would people want to pay real dollars for virtual currencies at all? And albeit Bitcoin’s “monetary supply” is determined by strict rules, which require super-computer to solve processor-intensive equations so that the supply of Bitcoin would […]