Monthly Archives: April 2014

Shadow banking as required reserve tax avoidance?

This is speculative. I don't know whether it works empirically. Or, I should say, I don't know how much it works empirically. The effect I am talking about here might be large, and explain almost everything. Or it might be small, and explain almost nothing. I'm just throwing it out there. Legally required reserves, if […]

Deflationary banks

It's good to think about weird worlds, which you know are different from the real world. It helps you understand the real world better. Here is a weird world where commercial banks' wanting to expand loans and deposits would reduce aggregate demand and cause deflation. But the only weird assumption is that currency and deposits […]

Temporary vs permanent money multipliers

"Otherwise what I was mostly trying to suggest was that the banks anticipate the fact that the central bank won't let them double the supply of money and factor this into their loan and deposit pricing. The idea is that the current amount of deposits is not so much based on the curren[t] supply of […]

What is a “managed exchange rate”?

It's a relative thing. I think it can only be defined relative to some specified alternative, like inflation targeting. It doesn't mean anything otherwise. There are n different things a central bank could target, where n is an extremely large number. (Strictly, n is infinite, since any combination of two members of n is also […]

Differentiating Ontario Universities

Yes, it is April 1st but this post is dead serious.  A study was recently done for economics, chemistry and philosophy departments across ten Ontario universities in an effort to gain insight on teaching workloads and research productivity.  The reason?  Ontario universities are tight for money and the government is looking for productivity gains and […]