After my recent bitcoin update, debates about the nature and chance of survival of the cryptocurrency were going on. Markets remain volatile and there were bad news again. One referred to Silk Road, the anonymous online market. Willard Foxton from The Telegraph asked: “The Online Drug Marketplace Silk Road Is Collapsing – Did Hackers, Government [...]

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In the few days since I published my last article on parallel currencies, Bitcoin did not stop catching the headlines. Apparently, the “cryptocurrency” easily digested the disruptions caused by hack attacks on MTGox which had resulted in a temporary drop in value of one Bitcoin from over $140 to about $120. (Remember that when Bitcoin [...]

“Gresham’s law, observation in economics that “bad money drives out good.” More exactly, if coins containing metal of different value have the same value as legal tender, the coins composed of the cheaper metal will be used for payment, while those made of more expensive metal will be hoarded or exported and thus tend to disappear [...]

Germany’s withdrawal from EMU and return to the D-Mark, Bundesbank already printing D-Mark to prepare for breakup, euro breakup into smaller currency unions, Italy already de facto out of the euro, Grexit, contagion from Cyprus. fears of Spain’s euro exit, considerations of France leaving the euro to regain monetary sovereignty, repatriation of German gold reserves [...]

On January 30, 2013, the Bank of England (BOE) released the latest semi-annual FX turnover survey results for the UK for October 2012. Similar surveys had been conducted at the same time by -  the New York Foreign Exchange Committee, -  the Singapore Foreign Exchange Market Committee, -  the Tokyo Foreign Exchange Market Committee, -  the Canadian Foreign Exchange [...]

*The author was Visiting Scholar, Bank of Japan, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies (IMES), Tokyo (1994), and Visiting Scholar, Economic Planning Agency, Tokyo (1995). ——- Currently, partly in reaction to earlier threats by Japan’s premier Shinzo Abe to curtail the independence of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), a big fuss is made in the [...]

These days, in countries with ailing financial institutions, getting rid of non-performing loans and other loss-generating assets in banks’ balance sheets by shifting positions to so-called bad banks is becoming a habit. The question is what is won with these constructs. In this context, the Japanese example is illuminating. The first time I heard about [...]