Reserved Place

A hazard of growing older is that some events that seem fresh and relevant in one's own mind mean nothing to the younger people that one increasingly works with. So it was last week, when RebelEc...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2011/11/easing-in.html

This is a post RebelEconomist really did not want to write, partly because he has an economic post to finish that keeps getting interrupted, and partly because he dislikes to see personal dispute...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2011/10/naked-hypocrisy.html

RebelEconomist comes late to this debate, but since it appears to remain active , his views may yet be useful. For what it is worth, RebelEconomist agrees with Hans Werner Sinn's conclusions tha...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2011/07/right-on-target.html

When RebelEconomist went to work in the City (of London) in the 1980s, an important perk of most UK financial jobs was a subsidised fixed-rate mortgage. In his case, this benefit was evaluated as...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2011/04/principals-of-subsidisation.html

Although RebelEconomist has always been sceptical about the more alarmist views of the global economic slowdown, he was unconvinced by Reuters' columnist John Kemp's argument , as reported by FT...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2011/03/setting-record-curved.html

Yesterday's monetary policy easing by the Bank of Japan was presented in some press reports and blog posts as a return to the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) that Japan tried from 1999 to 2000...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-like-zip-than-zirp.html

An edited version of the following commentary on the eurozone debt crisis appears in the latest edition of a magazine for official monetary and financial institutions and the original is posted h...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2010/07/we-had-to-burn-euro-to-save-it.html

INTRODUCTION RebelEconomist apologises, if anyone cares, for his lack of posts recently, which has been mainly due to computer breakdowns that made posting cumbersome. Fortunately, his new lapto...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-thin-ice.html

RebelEconomist values the NakedCapitalism blog for providing a digest of financial news and commentary, and admires its writer Yves Smith for her productivity and independence, but I am afraid t...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/08/misdisinformation.html

In a VoxEU column that attracted significant media attention , Eichengreen and O'Rourke (E&O) present evidence suggesting that the present global economic downturn is "every bit as big as the Gr...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-this-really-great-global-recession.html

RebelEconomist has been surprised by the recent strength of sterling, especially against the euro and the yen, and this short post offers an explanation for this behaviour which, as far as RebelE...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/06/does-china-appreciate-sterling.html

See paragraphs 27 to 40 of the previous post . In a nutshell, in its quantitative easing period from 2001 to 2006, the Bank of Japan focused on creating a certain quantity of reserves, and largel...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/05/pictorial-comparison-of-qe-in-japan-and.html

INTRODUCTION 1.     As the financial crisis has developed and increasingly affected real economic activity, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England (BoE) have resorted to prog...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/04/easing-understanding.html

Just a quick post to record an opinion on the idea of dealing with banks' troubled assets by writing insurance against their most extreme losses, a solution which has been applied in the UK , and...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2009/02/guaranteed-to-be-no-better.html

When RebelEconomist began writing this blog a year ago, he planned to write a series of three posts criticising obsolete US economic policies that by needlessly sticking to, the US economic au...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/12/us-economic-policy-shot-in-foot-3-gold.html

Henry Paulson's Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) is designed to alleviate the disruption of the US banking system caused by its holdings of various assets of dubious value (ie "troubled")...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/11/right-prat.html

Although RebelEconomist has previously argued that it would be possible for the USA to neutralise or even take advantage of the so-called "mercantilist" policies of its trade partners that have...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/10/just-say-no.html

As RebelEconomist has previously discussed , the US financial system lifeboat (now officially known as the troubled asset relief program, or TARP) ought to damage US sovereign creditworthiness, a...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/09/beware-rising-custody-holdings.html

On the road to financial ruin, an oniomaniac may cross a series of boundaries into increasingly desperate, previously unthinkable behaviour in order to carry on spending. Having exhausted their ...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/09/selling-family-silver.html

The news that the US authorities are devising a lifeboat for banks along the lines of the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s – let's call the impending scheme the RTC2 – called to Rebe...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/09/end-of-beginning.html

Many critics of China's exchange rate policy label it as "mercantilist", meaning that its purpose is to promote net exports in order to increase the country's financial wealth at the expense of ...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/09/mad-about-mercantilism.html

As the credit crisis has unfolded, several vicious circle processes have come to light which have contributed to its magnitude and persistence. Such positive feedback loops – which in this case...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/08/its-wind-up.html

It is often assumed that a country which pegs its currency to another must intervene in that currency pair to fix their exchange rate, and will therefore hold foreign exchange reserves in the peg...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/07/to-peg-is-not-to-hold.html

As an alternative to the savings glut explanation for the expansion of spread product in the US that ended in the sub-prime bust, in his previous post RebelEconomist suggested that investors’ ...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/06/greenspan-put.html

It is sometimes argued that foreign exchange intervention in support of the US dollar by dollar-pegging Asian central banks, which was especially heavy from 2002 onwards, contributed to the ongo...

http://reservedplace.blogspot.com/2008/05/enigma-inside-conundrum.html