Finance Basic To Advance Level Knowledge

My latest Macro Musings podcast is with Hester Peirce . Hestor is a Senior Research Fellow and director of the Financial Markets Working Group at the Mercatus Center. She previously served on Senator Richard Shelby’s staff on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. In that position, she worked on financial regulatory reform following the financial crisis of 2008 as well as oversight of the regulatory implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act. Hester also served at the Securities and Exchange Commission as a staff attorney and as counsel to Commissioner Paul S. Atkins.  Hester was also nominated by President Obama to be an SEC Commisioner. Hester joined me to discuss a new book she co-edited with Ben Klutsey titled “ Reframing Financial Regulation: Enhancing Stability and Protecting Consumers ” This book covers a lot of topics on how to better regulate the financial system.  We spent most of our time talking about how to improve the stability of the...

My latest Macro Musings podcast is with Sebastian Mallaby. Sebastian is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist to the Washington Post. Previously, he worked with the Financial Times and the Economist magazine and is the author of several books. He joined me to talk about his latest book “ The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan ”. This was a fascinating conversation throughout. You can listen to the podcast on Soundcloud , iTunes , or your favorite podcast app. You can also listen via the embedded player above. And remember to subscribe since more episodes are coming.

In a fo rthcoming paper , Chris Crowe and I argue the Fed is a monetary superpower: [A] defining feature of the US financial system is that its central bank, the Federal Reserve, has inordinate influence over global monetary conditions. Because of this influence, it shapes the growth path of global aggregate demand more than any other central bank does. This global reach of the Federal Reserve arises for three reasons.  First, many emerging and some advanced economies either explicitly or implicitly peg their currency to the US dollar given its reserve currency status. Doing so, as first noted by Mundell (1963), implies these countries have delegated their monetary policy to the Federal Reserve as they have moved towards open capital markets over the past few decades.  These “dollar bloc” countries, in other words, have effectively set their monetary policies on autopilot, exposed to the machinations of US monetary policy. Consequently, when the Federal Reserve ad...

  My latest Macro Musings podcast is with Eswar Prasad. Eswar is a professor of economics at Cornell University and a senior fellow at Brookings Institution. He joined me to talk about his new book, Gaining Currency: the Rise of the Renminbi .  We began by reviewing the history of money in China. Many people know that China had the first paper currency, but few appreciate that China had the first debates over monetary theory and role of the state in money creation. China also had the first currency war--literally a physical war between two competing central banks in China--as well as its own interesting monetary history during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  We then moved to China's exchange rate regime and the thorny question of whether China's currency being undervalued in the past and whether it was now overvalued. We also discussed how consequential was the past undervaluation of China's currency to the huge trade surplus it ran with the United States. O...

  My latest Macro Musing podcast is with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde .  Jesus is a professor of economics the University of Pennsylvania, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research.  Jesus does theoretical macroeconomic modeling, econometrics, and economic history. He has several books coming out on those topics and recently coauthored a chapter in the Handbook of Macroeconomics titled "Solution and Estimation Methods for DSGE Models". He joined me to talk about European economic history and macroeconomic modeling on the show.  Most of our conversation focused on German monetary history in the 20th century since it has been so consequential for the rest of the Europe. We began by discussing the Weimar hyperinflation of the early-to-mid 1920s and the Great Depression of the late 1920s-early 1930s. It is hard to appreciate the fact that Germany went from hyperinfl...