Juan E. Castañeda

CENTRAL BANKS: FROM POLITICALLY INDEPENDENT TO MARKET-DEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS

Responses to the financial crisis are undermining the Chinese walls painfully built between monetary and fiscal authorities. Central banks and state treasuries are working side by side as lenders of last resort. Central banks are helping economic ministers with purchases of public debt and discounting of private paper. Regulation and control of financial institutions is now a political football. Central banks must be seen again as market-dependent institutions in a world of currency competition. Privatisation in law or in fact is back on the table.

Money, Currency and Crisis : In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000

Money is a core feature in all discussions of economic crisis, as is clear from the debates about the responses of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States to the 2008 economic crisis. This volume explores the role of money in economic performance, and focuses on how monetary systems have affected economic crises for the last 4,000 years. Recent events have confirmed that money is only a useful tool in economic exchange if it is trusted, and this is a concept that this text explores in depth. The international panel of experts assembled here offers a long-range perspective, from ancient Assyria to modern societies in Europe, China and the US. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, and to anyone who seeks to understand the economic crises of recent decades, and place them in a wider historical context.

How Functional is the Eurozone? An Index of European Economic Integration Through the Single Currency

This article is a step towards empirically assessing how close the Eurozone is to becoming an ‘optimal currency area’, as originally defined by Mundell ([Mundell, R., 1961]). For this purpose we have compiled ten indicators, organised them in four partial indices, and summarised them in an overall indicator of ‘optimality’. The resulting picture is mixed, with zone optimality not increasing when circumstances were favourable but the trend towards integration returning after the 2008–14 crisis. The suggestion is that disintegration during the crisis, rather than being evidence of failure of the Eurozone when the going was tough, showed a self‐healing mechanism at work. However, our measurements and indices show that optimality is much further away than it was in 1999, when the euro was launched.

Central Bank Independence in Small Open Economies

Preliminary: please do not quote. We are greatly indebted to David Laidler for his comments on an early version of this paper, to J. R. Sargent for his comments on a subsequent draft, and to Anandadeep Mandal for assistance with data and Ali Kabiri for his suggestions of data bases and sources.