What’s at stake: The latest unemployment figures for the 15 to 24 years old age group have made big waves in the media and made European policymakers busy designing a series of packages ahead of the special Heads of State summit scheduled on June 27-28. Read more
Bruegel blog
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Blogs review: Tackling youth unemployment
14th June 2013
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Blogs review: The economics of a regime shift
30th May 2013
What’s at stake:For several years already (see our previous reviews on price level and nominal GDP targeting), monetary economists and historians have called for a regime change in monetary policy that would break with the past and greatly affect inflation and growth expectations. After two decades of deflation, this change has come to Japan. As with the UK experiment with fiscal contractions, the early effects of the Japanese experiment have been followed with great interest on both side of the Atlantic where the policy approach has been more incremental. In this post, I complement the discussion of Abenomics with historical evidence from the Great Depression. Read more
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Blogs review: Dealing with an impaired monetary transmission mechanism
17th May 2013
What's at stake: Dealing with the fragmentation of capital markets along national borders and the resulting lack of funding for SMEs in the countries of the periphery has been a central issue for the ECB for some time already. But the prospect of a prolonged double-dip has rendered it even more urgent. In this review, I document the extent to which the transmission mechanism of monetary policy within the eurozone is broken and discuss several proposals – such as a negative lending deposit rate and the creation of a new program targeted to SMEs – designed to increase the flow of credit in the periphery. Read more
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Blogs review: Bold ideas for the eurozone from economic history
26th April 2013
What’s at stake: Bruegel has recently come under criticisms for not proposing bold enough ideas to reform the eurozone. In this review, I present an eclectic set of proposals and analyses that have been put forward by economic historians to reform the functioning the eurozone in a big way. Read more
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Blogs review: The Reinhart and Rogoff debacle
19th April 2013
What’s at stake: The authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different, have faced the mother of all academic backlashes after a group of economists identified important flaws (including basic coding errors) in their analysis of the relationship between public debt and economic growth. Read more
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Blogs review: Understanding the mechanics and economics of Bitcoins
10th April 2013
What’s at stake: The value of Bitcoins – the peer-to-peer currency – has been soaring so much of late that you have certainly heard about it. It is also likely that you still don’t fully understand how this decentralized payment mechanism works in practice as it is hard to build a bridge between the overly general and the overly complicated descriptions of the system. Here is our (imperfect) take at it based on what we have read so far. The monetary economics of it is fairly straightforward and uninteresting, but the mechanics of making payments over a communications channel without a trusted party is really interesting. Read more
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Blogs review: The when and how of exit strategies
2nd April 2013
What’s at stake: Markets trembled when minutes from the December FOMC meeting revealed that members had discussed the side effects of maintaining a $85 billion pace of monthly asset purchases and the timing of its potential end. Read more
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Blogs review: Big Data, aggregates and individuals
26th March 2013
What’s at stake: The Big Data enthusiasts compare it to a revolution. For the agnostic observer, it is interesting to move beyond this general and somewhat speculative discussion and get a sense of what these massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions can and cannot do. Read more
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Blogs review: GDP, welfare and the rise of data-driven activities
18th March 2013
What’s at stake: The worry today is not that investment in technology might not be as productive as we thought (the so-called computer paradox), but the fact that the economic value of the fast growing consumption and production of online data may not be adequately captured in official statistics. While GDP has always been an imperfect metric for welfare, a number of authors have wondered if this issue has not become worse in the information age. Read more
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Blogs review: The stock market recovery
11th March 2013
What’s at stake: The strengthening of the U.S. economy was reflected last week by a positive jobs report with America adding 236,000 more jobs in February than it had in January, and an unemployment rate down to 7.7%. The past week was also marked by new highs in stock market valuations, which generated discussions about the sustainability of these improvements, the role of monetary policy in driving equity prices and the impact of stock market valuations on the rebuilding of household balance sheets. Read more