Number of results to display per page
Search Results
32. Estonia and the European Debt Crisis
- Author:
- Juhan Parts
- Publication Date:
- 04-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- Estonia has had a quick recovery from the recent recession and its economy is in better shape than before the crisis. It is now much leaner and significantly more capable of handling international shocks. After a sharp contraction, in which GDP contracted by over 14 percent in 2009, GDP growth rebounded quickly, growing at a rate of 3.1 percent in 2010 and 8.3 percent in 2011.
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Estonia
33. The Welfare State as an Underlying Cause of Spain's Debt Crisis
- Author:
- Pedro Schwartz
- Publication Date:
- 04-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The ongoing crisis that so dramatically hit Spain in 2008 was at least in part caused by the countercyclical monetary policy the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank applied in the first years of the new century. Their artificially low interest rates must in part be responsible for the excessive leveraging in banks, businesses, and households. Their unwarranted use of monetary policy to foster growth has recoiled on them with a vengeance. Now central bankers and their political masters find that they cannot perform as expected. A constant feature of financial crises in the past two centuries, as Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) have noted, is that, when banks collapse, companies fail, and families go insolvent they all turn to the central bank and the government to bail them out. The authorities usually find it difficult to answer those anguished calls even when they have the power to print money, so that devaluations and write-offs ensue.
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Spain
34. Curbing Campaign Cash: Henry Ford, Truman Newberry, and the Politics of Progressive Reform
- Author:
- John Samples
- Publication Date:
- 04-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- No one has yet written a detailed history of campaign finance regulation, even limited to the United States. In 1988, Robert E. Mutch published Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law. He then embarked on research seeking to fill out that story in the late 19th century. My own The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform combines public choice analysis with political theory in a way that historians might not recognize. Ray La Raja's excellent Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform Examines a larger historical tableau from a political science perspective. Paula Baker is apparently at work on a broader history of campaign finance and its regulation. This work began as a case study in that project and grew into a book. I look forward to the broader history, but I am happy to have this work.
- Topic:
- Reform
- Political Geography:
- Europe
35. The Eurozone Crisis and Global Monetary Reform: A Conversation
- Author:
- Robert B. Zoellick and Sebastian Mallaby
- Publication Date:
- 06-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- Sebastian Mallaby: We are here to talk to Bob Zoellick. I have been in Washington 16 years, Bob is the personification of the kind of silo busting polymathic energy which says, I am not just interested in international economics, I am not just interested in international relations, I am not just a U.S. government official, I am also going to do multilateral diplomacy. So Bob has been on all sides of those various divides. He has a voracious intellect, so it is always interesting to speak with him whether he is in office or out of office.
- Topic:
- International Relations
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and Washington
36. Alternative Political and Economic Futures for Europe
- Author:
- William A. Niskanen
- Publication Date:
- 10-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- Defeat of a proposed constitution for the European Union by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005 should have provided an opportunity to reflect on a broader range of alternative political and economic futures for Europe. But it did not. For the Lisbon Treaty, which became effective in December 2009, implemented most of the provisions of the proposed constitution that the voters rejected more than four years prior. It was important to reconsider the major current European political and economic institutions as well as alternative steps toward further European integration. For the major current institutions were created under different conditions, and the experience suggests that they may not best serve the peoples of Europe under current and expected future conditions.
- Topic:
- Disaster Relief
- Political Geography:
- Europe, France, and Netherlands
37. The New Monetary Economics Revisited
- Author:
- David Cronin
- Publication Date:
- 10-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- This article revisits the key conceptual aspects of the New Monetary Economics (NME) by examining the idea of “monetary separation” and objections raised against it. So long as a dominant role for base money in exchange exists, using it to provide the unit of account remains advantageous and is likely to outweigh any mooted benefits of separation. Recent quantitative analysis, however, shows the transaction demand for government base money to be falling, a development that can be expected to continue in the years ahead. The passage of time thus seems to be weakening the principal basis on which monetary separation has been criticized—namely, the superiority of base money in payments. That development fits into the history of money told by Austrian economists, which emphasises payment practices evolving over time in response to technological improvements and market forces.
- Topic:
- Government
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Germany, Cyprus, and Luxembourg
38. The Diversity of Debt Crises in Europe
- Author:
- Jerome L. Stein
- Publication Date:
- 06-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The foreign debts of the European countries are at the core of the current crises. Generally, the crises are attributed to government budget deficits in excess of the values stated in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), as part of the Maastricht treaty. Proposals for reform generally involve increasing the powers of the European Union to monitor fiscal policies of the national governments and increasing bank regulation.
- Political Geography:
- Europe
39. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
- Author:
- David Beckworth
- Publication Date:
- 10-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The historian Niall Ferguson can never be accused of lacking boldness. Over the past decade he has argued, among other things, that Europe would have been better off had Great Britain stayed out of World War I and allowed Germany to win, that the British empire provided a global public good that benefited the world economy, and that the United States should follow suit today by more actively embracing the demands of empire. He has also been championing the burgeoning field of counterfactual history, a development that many historians consider controversial given its speculative nature.
- Topic:
- War
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and Germany
40. Money and the Present Crisis
- Author:
- Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr.
- Publication Date:
- 01-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- We remain in an economic crisis and financial crisis, one that Gary Gorton has named “The Panic of 2007” (Gorton 2008). The thesis of this article is that monetary policy has played a pivotal role. Under Alan Greenspan and now Ben Bernanke, the Fed has conducted monetary policy so as to foster moral hazard among investors, notably in housing (O'Driscoll 2008a). More generally, the crisis is the product of a “perfect storm” of misguided policy. Policies to encourage affordable housing fostered the growth of subprime lending and complex financial products to finance that lending. Regardless of the desirability of the social goal, the financial super- structure depended on housing prices never falling. Housing prices do fall sometimes, and did so decisively beginning in 2007 (Gorton 2008: 50).
- Topic:
- Democratization, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Privatization
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and New Zealand