The Gold Standard 

Reviewing the record of outgoing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Economist reported: “Mr. Geithner’s life in the trenches has produced its own vocabulary. Serious decisions are ‘consequential’, good ideas are ‘cool’, better ideas are ‘compelling’ and the best ideas are at ‘the optimal frontier’. During a crisis ‘plan beats no plan’, jury-rigged measures in the face of unavoidable disaster are ‘foam on the runway’, and bad outcomes are ‘dark’. Managing public perceptions is called ‘theatre’. Some of his other langua Read more

Back in February, Lars Frisell, chief economist for the Central Bank of Ireland, gave a speech in which he warned that loose money would not lead to a strong euro.   According to Central Banking.com, “Speaking at the Institute of International and European Affairs, Frisell noted that the eurozone was failing at most if not all of the four criteria for an effective currency union originally put forward by Robert Mundell: labour and capital mobility; price and wage flexibility; roughly synchronised business cycles; an Read more

“Make it work.”  Tim Gunn popularized that phrase as his repeated advice to contestants on Project Runway. Over decades in public service and as an observer of economic policy, Paul Volcker has striven to make the American economy work. Volcker was a top Treasury official when President Nixon closed the “gold window” in August 1971 and had responsibility for cleaning up the international economic mess that action created.   In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was Federal Reserve chairman in charge of clean Read more

Where oh where is the yuan going.  The Wall Street Journal’s Fiona Law wrote: “The use of China's yuan abroad is rising as Beijing slowly loosens its grip and allows a wider group of investors to buy the nation's currency, stocks and bonds.

The offshore yuan in Hong Kong, where the currency is freely traded, is near the highest in a month partly because investors are taking advantage of a slight relaxation in rules on its capital markets. Last week, Beijing allowed Hong Kong units of Chinese banks and insurers, as Read more