In his comment to my post on The Home-currency Problem in the Euro Area the Wirtschaftsphilosoph raised an important point which I would like to elaborate here in some detail. This is what he wrote: “You are right that the euro is a large problem for all countries. However, the problem is not symmetric and Germany [...]

When I was a little girl, neighbors and friends of the family used to bring me coins from their travels which I kept in a small wooden box. For no special reason, I still have the box. Over the years, my treasure grew from my own travels, and those of my friends, and in this [...]

In answering to a comment by GeroldKeefer to my earlier post on Target2 I would like to make a new attempt to sort things out. Since this topic is still gaining increasing attention among the twitter community and others I put it here in a prominent place. This is the comment I refer to: Excuse [...]

*  This is the third part of a shortened and revised version of a paper published as Centres of Finance, Centres of Imagination: On Collective Memory and Cultural Identity in European Financial Market Places, in: GaWC Research Bulletin 92, 20th August 2002. Part I gave a brief overview of the history of financial centres, part [...]

*  This is the second part of a shortened and revised version of a paper published as Centres of Finance, Centres of Imagination: On Collective Memory and Cultural Identity in European Financial Market Places, in: GaWC Research Bulletin 92, 20th August 2002. Part I gave a brief overview of the history of financial centres, Part [...]

*  This is the first part of a shortened and revised version of a paper published as Centres of Finance, Centres of Imagination: On Collective Memory and Cultural Identity in European Financial Market Places, in: GaWC Research Bulletin 92, 20th August 2002. Part II will be on Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, Part III on [...]

When I was a little girl, neighbors and friends of the family used to bring me coins from their travels which I kept in a small wooden box. For no special reason, I still have the box. Over the years, my treasure grew from my own travels, and those of my friends, and in this [...]

Although called the footloose industry financial activities traditionally tend to concentrate in cities. Places such as New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong are among the latest ones in a long series of historic examples dating back to the big trading places of antiquity in Babylonia, Egypt and Phoenicia and, much later, the Italian fairs in Lucca, Genoa, Venice and Florence. Financial activities are an important element of world cities, large urbanised regions with a high density of economic...

When I was a little girl, neighbors and friends of the family used to bring me coins from their travels which I kept in a small wooden box. For no special reason, I still have the box. Over the years, my treasure grew from my own travels, and in this occasional series I would like to share it with you. Hong Kong 1959 The first coin is a 10 cent coin from Hong Kong minted in 1959. The picture shows the reverse with the name of Hong Kong in both English and Chinese, the year of minting and the...

In a recent column Paul Krugman expressed his astonishment about a message spread by Economics of Contempt that John Taylor from Stanford University and John H. Cochrane from the University of Chicago “are denying the importance of the Lehman shock”. If this is true it is not really news – the Cochrane text is of winter 2009/2010, the Taylor interview was conducted in December 2009, so the question is why our attention should be drawn to these two right now. In the Economics of Contempt piece,...