Suchergebnisse

Alexander Hamilton was the first U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1789 to 1795. When he started, the Federal Government was in default. During his tenure, U.S. Treasuries became the ultimate safe asset. He successfully managed expectations, achieved debt service reduction, and stabilized financial panics. He delivered sound public finances and financial stability. In the end, the U.S. possessed a modern financial system able to finance innovation and growth. At a time when Europe is working its way out of the sovereign debt crisis and implementing Banking Union and Financial Union, it is worthwhile to search for lessons from early U.S. history.

Alexander Hamilton was the first U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1789 to 1795. When he started, the Federal Government was in default. During his tenure, U.S. Treasuries became the ultimate safe asset. He successfully managed expectations, achieved debt service reduction, and stabilized financial panics. He delivered sound public finances and financial stability. In the end, the U.S. possessed a modern financial system able to finance innovation and growth. At a time when Europe is working its way out of the sovereign debt crisis and implementing Banking Union and Financial Union, it is worthwhil

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that price level targeting necessarily increases the volatility of inflation and economic activity. It shows that the optimal policy under commitment for a society that cares only about the variability of output and inflation involves only a limited degree of base drift. The result crucially depends on the importance of forward-looking behaviour and on the credibility of the commitments. The case for price level targeting is strengthened when the possibility of a binding lower bound on nominal interest rates is considered. This may be increasingly relevant in a low inflation environment. This justifies renewed interest on price level targets in the context of thinking through how to prevent and respond to deflationary risks.

Abstract
Intuitively, the observed "home bias" in individual portfolios plausibly explains the international capital immobility reported by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) as well as the survival of taxes on capital income. These intuitions are examined in a model where consumers prefer to consume domestically produced goods. The results show that international capital immobility is indeed present in the model: extra domestic savings generate extra investment primarily in the home country. When monetary policy focuses on exchange rate stabilization random domestic prices cause individuals to heavily invest in domestic equity as a hedge against price fluctuations. However our findings show that the specialization of equity portfolios does not necessarily facilitate the taxation of capital income. While random equity returns do facilitate taxes on equity income, as shown in Gordon and Varian (1989) and Huizinga and Nielsen (1997), random consumer prices appear to undermine taxes on capital income.