Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Ben Bernanke recommended [printing fiat money to finance public deficits] in 2003 but never repeated that advice after he became chair of the Federal Reserve". - responsibility of office?

"talented young people would be likely simply to leave their countries, reducing the tax base and walking away from their share of the inherited debts."

"It was a clear, precise and intellectual ly elegant policy framework: and it ended in economic disaster." - no it didn't, and it failed to take asset price stability into consideration.

"there is no one natural rate of interest' - but there is an aggregate one over the whole economy.

"regulatory arbitrage' - yes, that's what I'm talking about.

"...through the creation of banks with a dedicated focus on specific lending categories." - what like the former distinction between banks and building societies. Demand finds a way!

"it has proved remarkably difficult to induce even devout Muslims to embrace Islamic compliant mortgages."

"to apply to banking the same free market principles which apply to goods and services markets was to make a category error"

"The challenge of constraining credit and money creation would not be wholly resolved by requiring the formal banking sector to hold 100% reserves" - shadow banking.

"Germany, unlike France and the United Kingdom, does not have one strongly dominant leading city - but multiple mid-sized cities."

"Credit and real estate price cycles, as a result, as a result have been not just part of the story of financial instability in advanced economies they are close to the whole story."

"...the man in the middle - even the individual of the Aristotelian 'mean' - always remains a left-winger to the right wingers and a suspected right winger to left wingers.

"It is not possible to debate with fanatics if? on top of it all, they are stupid."

The Communists sold the books of successful writers they disapproved of in the West for hard currency. Thus ensuring the those writers international reputations?

" I began to search the works of the "second set" of Hungarian writers for what I wanted to take with me, because I knew I would never again find any trace of them abroad."

"Is there anything - a "country", a "people", a "nation" - that is worth my surrendering the demand of freedom?"

"That was the last time I saw Police. And that was the last time I saw Krudy's handwriting."

"Better risk management could advantage one bank relative to others, but moving every bank to best practice could paradoxically make the overall system more unstable."

"So policies relating to urban design and property taxation, to minimum wages and social benefits, are as important to long-term financial stability as are the technical details of prudential regulation."

"...most of [Krudy's] readers did not have the faintest notion of what surrealism was, and in all probability he didn't either."

Eurozone countries on average have had to pay higher interest rates than sovereign countries that can settle their debts with fiat money. That in turn has lead to eurozone countries running far lower fiscal deficits even though their average fiscal deficit is much lower than Japan's.

"...there was nothing magic about Asian growth: it mainly reflected rapid capital accumulation."

"[The story of the most successful East Asian economies] illustrates that neither political direction nor free market forces ensure an optimal quantity or allocation of credit; we face a choice of dangers."

"Business "machines" may be getting cheaper due to Moore's law and the zero cost of software replication, but long-term investments in necessary social infrastructure are not."

"Many of today's Russian Oligarchs achieved massive wealth because the moderate wealth they had already accumulated by the mid-1990s enabled them to borrow to buy natural resource assets cheap in a society where most people had no wealth at all."

"To achieve a less credit-intensive and more stable economy, we must therefore deliberately manage and constrain lending against real estate assets."

"The impact of fiat money creation thus depends crucially on it's scale. As Adam Smith noted..."

"Much of this activity is therefore inevitably a zero-sum game, privately beneficial for the most adept players but making society as a whole no better off, while absorbing real economic resources of capital, technology, and skilled labour for which the ultimate investor clients must in some way pay."