Bulgarian Stalemate

By -


The latest in the Bulgarian bank saga. The audit report on Corporate Commercial Bank is out. It's very grim reading, but does that mean the bank will be closed down? Not necessarily.....

Find out more here. (Forbes)


Comments

  1. epicresearch.co27 October 2014 at 11:58

    Glad to know that the "Payment" arrow at the top right hand side is also new money.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lessons from the Long Depression

By -
Image
A version of this post appeared on Pieria in December 2013. 
In my post “The desert of plenty”, I described a world in which goods and services are so cheap to produce that less and less capital is required for investment , and so easy to produce that less and less labour is required to produce them. Prices therefore go into freefall and there is a glut of both capital and labour. This is deflation.
There are two kinds of deflation. There is the “bad” kind, where asset prices go into a tailspin and banks and businesses fail in droves, bankrupting households and governments and resulting in massive unemployment, poverty and social collapse. America experienced this in the Great Depression and narrowly avoided it in the Great Recession. More recently, at least one European country has felt the effects of this catastrophe.
But there is also another kind. This is where falling costs and increasing efficiency of production create a glut of consumer goods and services. In other words, supp…
Read more

The myth of monetary sovereignty

By -
Image
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…
Read more

A lack of compassion

By -
Image
It's Saturday afternoon, and I have just returned from singing Evensong at Rochester Cathedral. The first reading was the dreadful story of Laban's deceitful behaviour towards Jacob. Laban made Jacob work for seven years in return for a promise of his daughter Rachel's hand in marriage. But at the end of the seven years, Laban palmed Jacob off with his other daughter instead, then made him work for another seven years to claim the hand of the woman he loved. This story is horrible not just because of Laban's underhand behaviour, nor even because Laban treated his daughters as his property, but because of the damage it did to Jacob's family. The rivalry between Rachel and her sister set up deep divisions that led to attempted murder and the disintegration of their family.

Writing in Unherd, Giles Fraser complains about disintegration of family. "Our social care crisis is a crisis of family and community life," he says. And he blames it on what he calls the…
Read more