At Forbes, I explain how regulatory changes and a difficult trading environment have forced Barclays to consign half of its investment bank to the scrap heap. What is left looks very familiar, though.....
For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant.
In 2008, the dollar's global reach enabled an American financial crisis to spread to the entire world, causing a deep recession and long-lasting malaise. Ever since, there has been a deep longing for a more stable international financial system, one which didn't depend on debt, wasn't dominated by the US and was immune to political whims. Some have called for a new Bretton Woods, or even for the return of the classical gold standard.
Bitcoin emerged from the financial crisis as a fledgling international dig…
Last week saw two high-profile corporate failures in the UK. Toys R Us finally went into administration after a stay of execution over Christmas. And private equity firm Rutland Partners pulled the plug on geeky electronics retailer Maplin. Total job losses from both failures amount to something in the region of 5,000 across the whole of the UK.
No-one was particularly surprised by the failure of Toys R Us. The company had proved slow to respond to the rise of online shopping and the trend away from large out-of-town retail outlets in favour of small local shops. In the US, Toys R Us filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (the American equivalent of administration) in September 2017. Despite the American company's insistence that its European operations were not affected, it was almost inevitable that the UK subsidiary would eventually follow suit. British consumers are shifting to online shopping every bit as rapidly as consumers across the Pond, and the trend towards loca…
How many countries can really claim to have full monetary sovereignty?
The simplistic answer is "any country which issues its own currency, has free movement of capital and a floating exchange rate." I have seen this trotted out MANY times, particularly by non-economists of the MMT persuasion. It is, unfortunately, wrong.
This is a more complex definition from a prominent MMT economist:
1. Issues its own currency exclusively
2. Requires all taxes and related obligations to be extinguished in that currency
3. Can purchase anything that is for sale in that currency at any time it chooses, without financial constraints. That includes all idle labour
4. Its central bank sets the interest rate
5. The currency floats
6. The Government does not borrow in any currency other than its own.
This appears solid. But in fact, it too is wrong.
The big hole in this is the external borrowing constraint - item 6 in the list. If a government genuinely could purchase everything the co…
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